I'll Seize the Day Tomorrow (8 page)

“If my father says he doesn't have the hots for Judge Judy,” I say, “then that's it. End of story.”

I finish the remaining bites of my meal, a man once more.

A Mission

(33 weeks)

SATURDAY, 10:15 A.M.

I open the front door and my mother hands me four cases of yogurt. All strawberry. She doesn't notice flavours. Coffee, vanilla, blueberry—they don't mean a thing. I ask her how much I owe her, and she tells me that with the coupons, and how she used them on double-down day, she actually made money off the purchase. I tell her I don't see how such a thing is possible, and she explains that the yogurts were a buck apiece and her coupons were for seventy-five cents. Doubled, that's a dollar fifty.

“I make fifty cents off each one I buy,” she says.

She's excited because she has a project for the two of us: a defective shirt that needs exchanging. She got it from a clothing store near my house that's been around for decades. When I was a kid, my mother would take me
there to buy shoes, making me take my pants off first for some reason, right in the aisle, before trying them on.

“What's wrong with the shirt?” I ask.

“It's missing a sleeve,” she says. ‘‘How can I let your father leave the house like that? No way.”

It should be said that my father has left the house in worse: green corduroy vests, T-shirts advertising aquarium supplies, ties intended for novelty use only. If it were handed to him as he was getting out of a shower, I'm sure my father would figure out a way to wear a bridge chair.

I ask how a missing sleeve might have escaped her notice during the purchase. She doesn't remember. She bought it a long time ago.

“How long ago?” I ask.

She doesn't really get the question. Life for my mother isn't exactly a chronological unravelling. She was coming to visit me. I'm around the corner from the store. It's just a clever thing to return it now—killing two birds with one stone. She looks at the bag and thinks for a moment.

“Five years,” she says.

This kind of operation is what my mother lives for. It would be a challenge, a battle of wills—a game of chess, but with yelling. I remember as a kid watching her open three bottles of tahini, one after the other. She wasn't satisfied with the hermetic popping sound the caps made—it was too muted. She liked a pop that was more emphatic, a pop that cried, “I have not been sprinkled with hemlock.” She returned all of them to a grocery store she'd chosen,
not because she bought the tahini there, but because of its proximity to our house.The store didn't sell tahini. I'm not sure they even knew what it was.

To be honest, it isn't that my mother exerts Clarence Darrow–like powers of persuasion; it's that she has no shame. None at all. As an adult, I seem to have taken on the extra shame she has no use for. I don't like to draw attention to myself. If a waitress gets my order wrong, I keep my mouth shut. If a bus driver goes past my stop, I just get off at the next one. Scenes just aren't my thing. But even now, no matter where I go with my mother, there are always the inevitable spectacles. Just the thought of her getting all froth-mouthed about that one-armed shirt—it was enough to make me queasy.

10:40 A.M.

At the store, my mother heads to the cash register and pulls the article of clothing out of the crumpled plastic bag.

“It's missing a sleeve,” she says to the saleswoman.

The saleswoman looks at it. Holds it up.Turns it around.

“It doesn't have sleeves,” the saleswoman says. “It's a poncho.”

“A pon-cho?” my mother repeats, as though it's a foreign word—which, in her defence, I guess it sort of is.

You'd think that would be the end of it, that my mother would accept the fact that we live in a universe where such a thing as a poncho exists, and we would leave.

But this is not to happen. Reason is of no concern in a staring contest.

“I don't care what it is,” she says evenly. “It's factorydefective. My husband can't wear it.”

I thought of my father, a man very big on tucking in clothes—sweaters, aquarium-supply T-shirts—packing the bottom of the poncho into his pants, belting up, and heading out for an evening on the town looking like Fatty Arbuckle.

The saleswoman refuses to give the money back, so my mother asks her to get the manager and the woman disappears behind a row of suit jackets.

10:50 A.M.

As we wait, I remain by my mother's side, standing there in this way I developed as a kid. It's a posture that's meant to convey filial loyalty peppered with a touch of what Vietnam vets call the thousand-yard stare.

In the back room, I imagine the saleswoman conferring with the manager, a bedraggled, shiny-jowled man, as he stares at my mother through a security cam, watching with a look of recognition that quickly turns to panic.

10:55 A.M.

The saleswoman returns, immediately offering store credit.

That's a mistake.Weakness.

“Credit? So you can unload socks on us?” my mother asks. “We need more socks like we need rickets.”

Desperate to defuse the situation, I grab a baseball cap off a nearby shelf and hand it to my mother. Reluctantly, she gets it for me with her credit.

“Lucky for you my boy needs a hat,” she says. “Walk around in it. Make sure it isn't too tight around the temples.”

As we leave the store together, my new cap on my head, I feel about ten years old.

“I'll hold on to the receipt,” my mother says. “Just in case.”

A Thousand Monkeys and Darwin

(32 weeks)

MONDAY.

I'm sick in bed. I wish I had some apple juice and Spider-Man comics, but for now I'd settle for Kleenex. I call up Howard to bring some over.

“Use toilet paper,” he says.

“That'd be unseemly for a man of my social carriage,” I say.

“Hey, did I tell you about my idea for a new twist on toilet paper?” Howard asks, sounding as though he's leaning into the receiver. “It's toilet paper that has the face of someone you hate printed on each square.”

Howard goes on to explain how his invention could mean the end of school bullying, gangland violence, and possibly, even war.

“Just ball up your detractors and wipe,” he says. “I
believe I've always done my finest work behind the backs of my enemies. Now they can do their finest work behind mine.”

We get off the phone and I get some toilet paper to blow my nose.With no enemies defaced, it almost feels like a waste of my effort.

TUESDAY.

My cold has not gotten better, so I lie in bed and watch Jerry Lewis's
The Ladies Man
. In one scene, Lewis's character, Herbert H. Heebert, is being force-fed baby food while strapped into a high chair. The scene has the look of something that's been directed by a thousand monkeys seated behind a thousand movie cameras.While the movie proves not to be very good, it is, in parts, stunningly beautiful to watch—the sets, the colours—and there are moments of almost perfect absurdity.

Beginning to feel guilty about not getting enough rest, I stop the film, but just before I do, Lewis, in an uncharacteristic moment of lucidity, says wistfully, “Being alone can be very lonely. At least with people around, you can be lonely with noise.”

Wisdom can come from the most unexpected places, and no place is more unexpected than the spastic, baby food
–
encrusted mouth of Jerry Lewis.

WEDNESDAY.

Lonely, still sick, and without anything to make lunch with, I call up Tony to see if he'll bring me over some food.

“All I've got is half a bag of Fritos and some pickles,” I say.

“You should forget about lunch and just snack,” he says. “Snacking is a very evolved human endeavour.”

“How's that?”

“I just saw a news report about how in three billion years, a day will be a month long. So with breakfast being two weeks away from dinner, and dinner being two weeks away from lunch, snacking between meals will be an evolutionary necessity.”

“Can you bring me over some chicken soup?” I plead.

“No dice,” he says. “
Wheel of Fortune
is about to come on and I've got a bowl of cereal on my lap.”

I get off the phone and open the bag of Fritos. I only wish Darwin was alive to see this.

Beginnings, Middles, and Ends

(31 weeks)

MONDAY.

Fully recovered, I've started writing a story for my radio show. It's about a man who spends the morning eating himself sick with pie only to remember—in a flash of sinus-clearing terror—that he's due to participate in a county fair pie-eating contest in an hour. He'd drunkenly challenged his ex-wife's new husband to an eat-off several weeks earlier, and now, ready to burst at the seams, he sets off to the fair to do his best.

I want it to be a parable about remaining stoic in the face of nausea. While I know it will end with his being rushed to the ER to have his stomach pumped, I'm not sure what happens in the middle.

I look over my notes. They are not helpful. One note reads “Make pie more existential.”

Writer's block descends like a … something or other.

TUESDAY.

Still unable to write the story, I take a break and read the latest
New Yorker
for inspiration. I arrive at a poem that contains the following lines:

Seasons repeat themselves, but the tree Shading the yard keeps growing.

Ideally, how should a
New Yorker
poem be read? The same as you would a
New Yorker
cartoon? Because it feels inappropriate to partake in a beautiful bit of verse filled with simple, profound truths about the human condition and then return to a profile of Lady Gaga on the same page.

And so after finishing the poem, I take a walk in the snow.

WEDNESDAY.

Writer's block persists.

I decide to nap, and while asleep I dream I'm riding an old-fashioned bicycle while sporting a handlebar moustache drenched in mustard. It strikes me as a portentous omen. I awake and immediately call up Tucker to go for hot dogs.

Tucker says that hot dogs seem like a good idea, that they may buoy his spirits. He says he's been filled with so
much self-loathing lately that he considers starting each day by spitting into his own coffee.

Tucker's self-revulsion might be part of a growing cultural trend—one that can inspire whole new markets of enterprise. I can imagine seeing these special coffees sold at Starbucks for five dollars a pop. Call them “prison cappuccinos.”

I tell Tucker my idea and he says that if it were to bear his imprimatur, he would not want it offered with soy.

“I'm tired of hearing everyone talk about how they're switching from milk to soy.Why doesn't anyone talk about switching from milk to whisky?”

Soon Tucker will bring his trademark iconoclasm to the hot dog joint where, as usual, he will eat his wiener by alternating his bites from one end to the other end until he is left with his final, middle bite.

Tucker's hot dog technique recalls what Jean-Luc Godard had to say about film: there should always be a beginning, middle, and end—just not necessarily in that order. And like Godard, Tucker upsets expectations. So much so that the counterman, as always, watches him eat while waiting anxiously for the whole confusing spectacle to end. I watch, too, making my peace with the fact that sometimes the middle is the last thing you reach, in hot dogs as well as stories about pie-eating.

Padding the Dream

(30 weeks)

SUNDAY.

As my wallet is beginning to smell like a junkyard Barcalounger and look as misshapen as my father's, I've purchased a new one. I go through the old one and empty it of the shards of plans left undone. Business cards for services meant to improve my life, unfilled medical prescriptions meant to improve my health, and fortune-cookie fortunes that were meant to inspire me but instead only made me hungry for Chinese food. A dream deflated does not look like a raisin in the sun. It looks like an old emptied wallet.

I slide the new streamlined billfold into my back pocket, turn around to look at it there, and realize that, without a wallet full of hope, my once shapely buttocks are a thing of the past.

WEDNESDAY.

Howard and I have ordered pizza. When the delivery guy hands over the bill, Howard suggests I break in my new wallet.

The food arrives cold, so I go into the kitchen to reheat it.To my horror, I discover that my oven, which I've not opened in months, looks like the inside of a hot dog factory chimney.

THURSDAY.

My neighbour Mike calls up. He wants me to come over and eat his wife's chicken soup while Boosh pees on his living room carpet. Why? Because he's superstitious and wants to recreate the exact circumstances of my visit last month when the Montreal Canadiens beat the Florida Panthers. I tell him I can't make it, that I have an oven to clean.

FRIDAY.

I wake up and find that a small card has been tossed through my mail slot. It's from Mike.

“Thanks for making the Canadiens lose,” the card reads.

I place the card in my wallet, and then tuck the wallet
into my back pocket. I walk over to the wall mirror and spin around to examine myself.

“In good time,” I think, “you will have the rump of a Greek god.”

Baby Steps

(29 weeks)

MONDAY.

My sister was in her late thirties when she announced her pregnancy.

“It's a miracle,” my mother said. Dina Goldstein is a woman who had me in her teens, and she believes in early starts. Rising at 5:00 a.m. to dust ceiling fans and fireplace logs, she is sprung from the mould of shtetl women past who cleaned, loved, and worried with great ferocity. Which is to say, she'd been waiting to be a grandmother since her twenties. And which is also to say, with my sister's good news, the pressure was off me.

Today is the blessed day of the baby's arrival, and we all meet up at the hospital. I've never been in a room where so many members of my family are so happy all at once. Usually, maybe one or two are happy at any given time while the rest hold down the fort, remaining dyspeptic,
dysphoric, or boldly struggling to maintain a nice, even level of dispiritedness.