The Potty Mouth at the Table (17 page)

Once my hand was safely balled in a fist at the edge of the table, I decided that I needn’t comment on his inappropriate behavior because the speed at which my hand had recoiled at the stroke of his meaty digit spoke for itself. I would just rather gloss over the incident than deliver a lecture to a man-child—especially when one of us was happily married. Most of the time. Except for the moments when she wished she had bought her husband a Sonic Super Ear for Christmas, since he went mysteriously and tragically deaf the day after they were married, with the exception of when an episode of
Law & Order
is on or he’s having a beer with one of his friends in a crowded, noisy pub.

Now scented like a sweaty grilled onion, I tried to think of something else to say, so I asked about his family and listened while he filled me in on their lives and kept my hand on my side of the table and out of porn sign-language radius.

The remainder of the lunch was pleasant, we talked about old times and he caught me up on the latest news
from people we used to know with whom I’d lost touch. I was beginning to forget about the finger misdemeanor; in fact, I’d already downgraded it to an infraction and chalked it up to a nervous moment. Maybe he didn’t even mean to finger my palm. Maybe it was just a twitch, a sudden jerk, an involuntary profane gesture that grazed my palm when it wasn’t supposed to and had no meaning at all aside from being a misfiring of human chemistry.

I began to feel embarrassed for myself about jumping to such conclusions, and was sorry that I had such a severe reaction. I should have been cooler about it.
People have weird body spasms all the time,
I scolded myself.
I mean, my foot suddenly kicks an inch on occasion as if a doctor were checking my reflexes. And my pinky sometimes wigs out and shakes as if it’s trying to fake out the other fingers and make a break for it.

I actually shook my head at myself, something that was not lost on my ex-boyfriend, who asked me what was wrong.

“Oh, nothing, nothing. I forgot to run an errand for my mom,” I lied.

To make up for my failing judgment, I picked up the bill to clear my conscience and we headed out to the parking lot, parallel to a major freeway, making it a little more litter-strewn and noisy than it used to be.

“It was great to see you,” I said, giving him a friendly hug when we reached his car.

“It was great to see you, too,” he said, reciprocating the hug. “Give me a kiss!”

I leaned in and gave him a peck on the cheek.

“Come on! How long have I known you?” he asked, laughing. “
Laurie!
Give me one on the lips!”

I don’t think the warning sirens at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant could have been louder.

Stop being so judgmental! Be cool! Be cool!
my mind screamed.
You are going to hurt his feelings if you haven’t already! Just get in there and make it quick. Fraction of a second and it’s over and done with. One, two, three!

Kissonthelips!

And then, on four, I knew that the flick of the digit was, in fact, a come-on, a trigger-finger porn move and not a nervous tic or a vitamin D deficiency. Because when someone tries to shove his tongue into your mouth by pushing through your priggish, tightly pursed lips, like a slug trying to press through a hairline crevice in a rock wall, the window of possibility quickly slams shut, or at least my window of possibility did.

Frankly, I did not know that I could move that fast. Based on the speed of my recoil alone I think I need to enter the Olympics in the “Revulsion” event.

“Hey!” I managed to cry in protest. “I’m married!”

And so my ex-boyfriend, after a moment of thinking, looked at me and said frankly, “I’m horny.”

I’m horny.
Really? Did you really just say that? You’re horny? As a taxpaying adult, I have to say that no one has ever tried to French-kiss me uninvited in a dirty parking lot on the side of the freeway in at least a decade and a half. And I couldn’t pinpoint the last time I heard that line, but now that I think of it, it was most likely uttered from the same lips that just tried to pry my mouth open like a can of Navajo White. And he wasn’t even drunk!

What I should have said was, “How about you call my husband and tell him that?” But despite the early warning signal when my palm “got fingered,” I was unprepared for the attempted slide into a very advanced
and dirty
first base.

“
I am married,
” I repeated. Then I lowered my voice and added indignantly, “
We have a dog together.
”

And honestly, if I were going to disrupt my dog’s weekend for alternate custody, I would hope that it would not be for a guy whose lunch I just paid for.

Again.

So I left, and the first thing I did when I got into my car was call my sister and say, “Guess who just tried to kiss me like a hillbilly on a reality TV show?” And after that, I called my husband and started to tell him the whole story.

“
Stop,
” he said, even before I got to the “I’m horny” comment. “Just stop.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, rethinking my decision to bring it up. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“I just can’t handle it,” he replied. “He sounds so . . .”

I waited for the word.

Infatuated?

Covetous?

Obsessed?

His pause spoke volumes. It was telling me: “You are a powerful woman. I don’t know if you realize this, but men can barely resist you. That poor, consumed fool.”

“. . . 
desperate,
” he finished.

Then it was my turn to pause.

“What?” I finally replied, deciding to give him a big dose of his own Sonic Super Ear medicine. “What?
I can’t hear you!
”

T
here are certain places in a grocery store that are far more dangerous than others, and for the innocent, I’m not talking about the ice-cream aisle. I’m talking about the partitioned part where the Vicodin lives. True, if prehistoric birds attacked the store or there was a hostage situation, I’d always pick Pill Land over the candy lane as a spot to hole up. But in everyday, regular circumstances, it’s a terrifying, naked place.

This leads me to admit that I’m there constantly because I cannot get my inhaler, my high blood pressure pills, and my Ambien dolls coordinated for the same pickup; as a result, I know everyone there on a first-name
basis. You’re not supposed to know the white-coats by name until you’re about sixty-eight, but at least I’m ahead of schedule for
something.
Still, when I get the phone call reminding me that my prescription is ready to be picked up, I shudder.

If you really want to be afraid for mankind, you don’t even need to know who Paul Ryan is. All you have to do is lurk for five minutes by the pharmacy.

6. “Do you know where the stuff for lice is? Because I can’t find it in the shampoo department.”

I don’t get it. Suddenly, kids have lice and everybody’s cool with it to the point of broadcasting it in public. Did something happen since I was in school that has made these vermin an accepted part of childhood? I know bedbugs are all over the place, but lice? Really? Who keeps going to Eastern Europe and bringing this shit back?
Stop going to places that end in “-ia,”
you guys.
Stick with France. I mean it.
Besides, I thought we got rid of lice and polio in the same vaccine. And to shout it out in a pharmacy line? This is what I wanted to say to that lady, in no particular order:

• “You are dirty and you should be more ashamed.”

• “Put a friggin’ plastic bag and a rubber band over your head if you cannot afford a shower cap, because one will not be provided for you.”

• “If there was ever an unquestionable reason for the Internet to exist, this is it.”

• “If my head starts to get itchy and I find eggs on my scalp, I am going to sue you for public endangerment of a hypochondriac.”

5. “Hi. I was wondering if you could tell me what a staph infection looks like.”

Let it be known that the person who made this statement did not have a prescription and had just wandered over from handling some produce when she plopped a five-pound bag of russets on the counter and proceeded to embark on a fifteen-minute conversation that included other standout sentences, including, “Infection can burrow,” “Is there a head?” and “Have you tried to pop it?”

Also let it be known that I don’t know exactly what can kill a staph infection, but I did feel that time was of the essence. After picking up my Ambien, I went directly to the freezer section, where I held bags of frozen peas until my hands burned, and also refused to buy anything for a month at
Safeway that hadn’t been through some level of chemical processing and irradiation.

4. “I Wish I Could Show You.”

It was this statement that made me wish that pharmacists were allowed to put out tip jars like baristas because they take way more shit than anyone seems to realize, including having to talk people down after they threaten to remove vital items of clothing, which is way worse than people complaining that the design on their mocha isn’t fancy enough.

Anyway, in this instance, an old man in overalls had a “scaly patch” he wanted an opinion on, after confessing that he scratched himself so aggressively he bled. Despite his detailed description, the pharmacy tech, who I believe did nails at the mall up until the week before, kept shrugging and offered an unsatisfactory diagnosis by telling him to contact a physician and not ask a twenty-year-old girl who had no more of a background in skin diseases than did the kid stocking eggs. Fearing that an impasse had been reached, the overalled man expressed his desire to reveal the patch itself, an offer the tech firmly declined. Thank God.

3. “Smith. S-M-I-T-H. It’s for Clozaril. An antipsychotic.
Would you hurry up, please!”

Awesome. The meds no one can find behind the counter
are for the guy in line ahead of me who has the most potential to snap my neck like Liam Neeson while I quickly pen a good-bye note to my family on the back of my credit card bill. Now, I’m not saying that there has to be an express window at the pharmacy for people just picking up some asthma medicine. But maybe there should be a window that is designated specifically for the needs of people who have magical powers like time travel and who take orders from their dog. That window could come equipped with a tranq gun and a net that drops from the ceiling. Barring that, I have learned to keep a low profile, so that my mother doesn’t have to live the rest of her life with my credit card bill framed on her mantel, while telling people: “She was an idiot. She stayed in line for her sleeping pills. And she was paying twenty-two percent!”

2. “Go ahead. Call the cops. I have a prescription, and the cop already hassled us outside, anyway!”

This from the Bonnie and Clyde duo of tweakers who hopped around like the floor was lava and they both had a hot potato in their pants. Now, maybe my strategic skills are a little dull, but I think the last thing I’d offer as proof that my prescription was real and not scribbled on a stolen doctor’s pad would be that I was already considered a person of interest by the authorities before I even got in the store.
I’m sure their appearance had nothing to do with it, being that the only difference between a zombie and a tweaker is that a zombie is usually eating something. This pair got in four fights in the ten minutes they were in front of me and then made up with each other by picking at their face scabs. I was sure that if either one of them farted, it would blow a chemical burn through my leg. I don’t know if they ever got their drugs; they were, naturally, standing in the wrong line.

1. “Whoever was in the bathroom when I told you before is still in there, and now they’re moaning.”

Leave it to a lady who isn’t confident in the quality of her undergarments to announce that someone either just got high, just had sex, or just had a heart attack in the restroom right next to the pharmacy. There is nothing that could make me step foot over that threshold. I’ve seen what comes out of there and that’s enough of a deterrent for me. It was dirtier than the Chili’s in Redding, California—and
that
is saying something.

Honestly, I’ve heard sounds emanating from behind that bathroom door that sounded as if a rodeo were under way and that whatever was trying to get away repeatedly kept escaping. Yes, it is true, I have a thing about germs, but that doesn’t discount the severity of human debris that accumulates within that twenty square feet. Once, my husband,
who had been deathly ill for eleven days, came into my office to tell me about the new season of
Portlandia,
and then he stopped and said, “I know you’re not turning around because you think if you don’t face me, you won’t get my germs and they’ll bounce off the back of your head. But I have protected you.” I turned around slowly to see that he was wearing a napkin around his face like a bandit.

So yes, I hate gross bathrooms and this one was located right next to the pharmacy, which quite frankly surprised me for a supposedly sterile environment devoted to wellness. This particular john had seen so many unseemly acts, most of which would have required a forensics team to decipher had a lady with bladder-control issues not been jiggling the door handle repeatedly. The manager was still banging on the door when I left, but I didn’t care. I was sure that they would get whoever it was out of there before it was time to come back the next day and pick up something else.

I
f the Internet is the seventh circle of hell, as I believe it to be, then Facebook is without question its reigning five-star general. There’s no doubt that the social network swamp is the first in the goose step, leading its troops into a swirling bottomless pit of cringes, things that cannot be unseen, and peeks at humanity that result in a creep factor worthy of Hieronymus Bosch.