It's All Relative (12 page)

Sometimes my grandma would insert globs of those nasty orange slices, the ones she kept in her cut-glass candy dish that always ended up melding into something resembling a spleen. Occasionally she
would stuff our eggs with leftover liqueur-filled chocolates—ones she hadn't finished from Christmas—which I would mainline before becoming belligerent and then very, very sleepy.

And, to top our Easter off, my grandma didn't even use “real” Easter eggs, the petite plastic ones that clicked snugly together and came in bright spring colors. Rather, our eggs were actually leftover L'eggs containers, which at one point housed her taupe stockings.

As a result of all this, my family wisely stopped hunting eggs while I was still fairly young and instead focused our competitive spirit on playing board games and gorging on ham.

Which is why—at the age of thirty-two—when I spent my first Easter at Gary's parents' home, it came as quite a shock to discover his mom still hid eggs.

For adults and grandchildren.

In spots even Helen Keller could locate.

In fact, Gary's family had never hidden their Easter eggs outside.

One Easter, when Gary was little, he said he remembers pulling back the dark-brown curtains in the living room of his house and watching other families in the neighborhood hunting for their eggs outside.

“What's going on?” Gary asked his mother. “What kind of people hunt for eggs outdoors?

“People who've obviously never had allergies,” she told him.

For Gary's mom, a woman who loves the holidays as much as her homemade dickeys, potpourri, and Buick LeSabres, the thought of anything new, any external forces that could ruin a holiday, scared her. To wit:

It might rain.

It might be too cold.

A rabid squirrel might attack a grandchild.

A baby bird might choke on a forgotten jelly bean.

So Gary's mother always held Easter in a climate-controlled
environment, where things could be monitored. If Gary's mom had known about the Biosphere earlier, she would have built that instead of a brick ranch house.

She was the polar opposite of my father.

In fact, her main Easter rule was this: No one should find it difficult to locate his booty.

As a result, she hid the same number of eggs for each person, all containing the same amount and type of candy in exactly the same location every year.

I use the word
hid
loosely. She “hid” eggs in the center of the hallway, in the middle of the dining-room table, in the bathroom sink, in my coffee cup.

And if you had any trouble finding those, his mom even decorated an Easter tree with eggs, a sort of hybrid Christmas tree decorated by a rabid Easter Bunny. I had never seen nor heard of an Easter tree before—much less known you could buy Easter-egg ornaments with which to decorate it—until I met Gary's mother.

Perhaps, I thought, watching Gary pose excitedly behind the Easter tree as his mom snapped photos, my partner still believed this Dr. Seuss tree grew in some magical place, some land where barely enough light filtered through dark-curtained clouds to grow weak, white branches that immediately had to be potted in Styrofoam.

“Easter Bunny's been here!” his mom chirped through the door my very first Easter morning in her home, just after Gary and I had finished having sex. (I do not, by the way, condone having sex on major religious holidays. I believe it's bad luck. However, I had no choice: That was the morning I learned Gary became Jeff Stryker whenever the heating and cooling vents in his parents' house turned on, because the noise used to cover his teenage moans.)

“What do we do?” I asked Gary in a panic.

“Just giggle excitedly.”

Which I did.

I sounded like one of those guys just before he gets busted on
To Catch a Predator
, the ones who walk through the front door carrying sweet tea, condoms, and a bag of McDonald's just as the decoy disappears with a basket of laundry and Chris Hansen appears in the kitchen.

Instead, his mom reciprocated, giggling like a junior-high cheerleader who just found out that the cutest guy in eighth grade would go to Sadie Hawkins with her.

“I just saw the Easter Bunny jump away but heard him wish you both a ‘hoppy' Easter!” she said.

“Is she kidding?” I asked Gary.

“
Sssshhhh!
It's tradition,” he said.

“Any-
bunny
want some fresh muffins?” his mom continued, her mouth in the crack of the door, mere feet from my exposed crotch. “Or would you rather have some carrots?”

“Is she on crack?” I whispered.

“You're such a crank. She's excited. You're just jaded from your Easter past.”

I entered to find a Stepford Easter, in which everything was perfectly choreographed. Our Easter baskets (separate from our eggs) were filled with candy and CDs and Easter-tree ornaments and gift certificates; it was like an Oscar swag bag.

Additional “surprise” eggs were placed directly in my line of sight: “What? There's one on my breakfast plate? I never would have seen it. Thanks for the heads-up!”

It was lovely and generous, but somehow I missed Easter at home, my dad hiding eggs that would have taken me all day to unearth.

I was slicing my second piece of traditional Easter coffee cake, which contained roughly four pounds of brown sugar, when I heard the table shaking. I looked up to find that Gary had inserted into his mouth fake rabbit teeth—ones that he had made out of cardboard in elementary school decades ago—and was hopping around the table, at the urging of his family.

“It's tradition,” he mouthed at me, with an enormous overbite. “I'm the Easter Bunny.”

His parents were laughing and clapping.

Gary was hopping.

And then he laid an egg.

Which rabbits don't do.

It was disturbing.

It was … 
just what I needed to see?

It was at that moment that I fully came of age as an adult: I no longer cursed my occasionally dysfunctional family, and I actually missed our traditions, the ones only my family celebrated, no matter how eggs-asperating they were.

In fact, all of this made me downright
hoppy
because—as it would turn out—I had doubled my dysfunction.

“Your turn!” Gary's parents urged.

I put Gary's drool-drenched cardboard rabbit teeth into my mouth and hopped around the table.

And then I laid an egg.

Because it was tradition.

“B
eggin' for blurbs,” as I call it, is the author equivalent of a wedgie: You know what's coming is going to be painful, but you can't stop it.

My last “official” wedgie occurred on April Fool's Day decades ago when our rural Eddie Haskell asked, “Knock, knock? Who's there?” and before I could reply, said, “Your underwear!” before lifting me into the air by my Hanes. It's a punchline I still don't get, considering the comedy was entirely physical.

Flash forward twenty years to the publication of my first memoir. One of the initial media interviews I conducted was on April Fool's Day, a week before
America's Boy
was set to publish.

I felt ready to conquer the world.

But the DJ asked what it felt like to be compared to Augusten Burroughs and Haven Kimmel, the two memoirists mentioned in my jacket copy, as well as David Sedaris.

It was then I knew I was damned.

“Have you met them?” the Morning Zoo asked me. “Are they as hilarious in person?”

The closest I have ever come to Burroughs, Kimmel, or Sedaris is “beggin' them for blurbs.”

In fact, I spent weeks crafting a pitch letter to these writers I'd never met but long admired. I perfected prose that was complimentary but not stalkerish, hilarious yet poignant.

Then I spent hours staring at the “Send” icon, wondering what these authors were doing at that very moment.

Was Burroughs between pieces of Nicorette and, if so, would he be irritated when he opened the e-mail?

Was Amy Sedaris making a bologna casserole for David? And would my e-mail be funny enough to make him go, “Get over here, Amy. This Wade Rouse is funnier than
Two and a Half Men
. We must blurb.”

Of course not.

Burroughs's assistant kindly said he no longer provided blurbs.

I tried for six months to contact Sedaris, which proved more painful than giving myself rhinoplasty.

Kimmel kindly agreed to read my manuscript,
if
she had time.

I never heard from her again.

I assumed she despised the book and thus opted not to send, “This is the worst piece of crap I'll ever read in my life!” Which is a shame, because my publicist could easily have edited that to read: “This is the … piece … I will … read [all] my life!”

I harbor no ill will. They're busy, trying to lead normal lives, and I realize they're overwhelmed by such requests.

I guess I'd just like to see some publishing evidence that blurbs really help sell books, or if they are simply internal ego boosters, like literary Botox.

Ironically, moments after my April Fool's media debacle, a well-known author I'd asked for a blurb e-mailed—a year after my request—with a catty note, the basic sense of which was, “Do you know who I am?”

Yes. Which is why I had asked in the first place
.

My April Fool's joke was no longer funny. Which is why my partner, Gary, dragged me to a psychic.

To undo the blurb curse.

Now, I don't believe in psychics. They are the equivalent of Ron Popeil in a turban.

However, Gary adores one particular back-alley medium who wears a pound of purple eye shadow and has more feral cats than teeth.

“She has ‘the gift,' ” Gary told me.

It cost me fifty dollars for a half hour, roughly what my dentist charges, money I'm convinced he doesn't spend on cat food and vodka.

When we arrived, the psychic led me to a dark room with incense burning, pushed me into a rickety chair in front of a cloth-draped table, and stared into a glass ball I'm convinced she bought at Spencer's.

She leaned dramatically across the table, grabbed my hands, and shut her eyes.

“I can feel your stress,” she said. “I see great things in your future, if you can just transcend your doubt.”

Gary whispered, “Concentrate, Wade. Unchain your baggage. Release the image of Augusten Burroughs. Let go of Haven Kimmel. Set the Sedaris spirit free.”

Just like that, the psychic dropped my hands as if they were made of concrete and screamed, “Oh, my God, you know them? They're my favorite writers! Are they as funny in person?”

I clamped my eyes shut and concentrated. In fact, for once I swore I could hear the spirits talking, telling me something very specific:

“
Start writing fiction. Perhaps novelists blurb.
”

T
hree days into spring, just as the mounds of dirty snow had melted into tiny rivers that forked through the hollows of our Michigan woods like country interstates, we found a dog.

Our neighbors, who own the blueberry farm and acreage that backs our woods, actually found it, calling us early that evening, just after daylight savings time, when the sun was still perched high in the sky.

“We just found a dog lying in our compost pile. Think it's dead.”

Gary trudged over with a leash and a towel, green waders up to his knees, and a load of optimism.

Gary is an optimist.

One of those dirty stinking, the-sun-will-come-out-tomorrow optimists.

And, despite my tone, I love him for that.

He is the anti-me.

Ten minutes later he was back, leading the wobbly dog, which still had part of a rotting cabbage head in its mouth. The dog was a dirty, dingy, pee yellow, and there were burrs and cuts and dried blood strewn throughout its fur. Its nails were so long, they had curled and bent and grown into his pads, which were infected and raw. His eyes were matted shut. And the dog's ribs were showing—it
was dust bunnies on bones, really—its midsection so thin, I could nearly encircle it with both my hands.

I wanted to cry, and puke, and scream, and immediately put it out of its misery. I wanted to strangle those who had done this, who could do this. But instead I said to Gary, “You'd kill for a waistline like that,” because that's what he needed to hear at that moment, especially since he looked just like a kid who, for the first time, was seeing the grim reality of the world, of the woods.

Gary smiled through his tears.

Gary and I are country kids who moved to the city and then returned to our rural roots. We had grown accustomed to sprawling suburban yards and well-groomed purebreds with vanity collars who drank out of Pottery Barn ceramic dog bowls decorated with bones.

This dog was barely breathing.

Gasping for air.

Its teeth were chattering.

As it lay on its side we held some water to its face, and it smelled for it, its broad snout knocking the bowl from our hands. Its jaw released the cabbage head and its teeth began to chatter even more violently.

“Aren't you thirsty, boy?” I asked in a sing-song voice, my teeth chattering, too. “Aren't you thirsty, big guy?”

With every ounce of strength it seemed to possess, the dog willed its matted eyes open and looked up at me.

He was blind.

And then the dog licked my hand, rested his head on Gary's lap, and seemed to stare directly into my eyes.

He could see nothing, it seemed, but straight into my heart.

I named the dog Wonder, for many reasons.

Most obviously, it was a wonder he had survived, managed to
make his way through the woods, in the dark, dying, for God knows how long.