The Potty Mouth at the Table (2 page)

I texted Ariane as soon as I saw the sun crest over my neighbor’s roof.

Laurie Notaro 7:46 a.m.

I didn’t get tickets. :( Did you? Did you e-mail me? I’ll check again. Nope. Nothing? What about you? No. Still nothing!

Laurie Notaro 7:48 a.m.

Hello? Hello? I thought you got up at 7. Check your e-mail! Anxious! Like a little hard to breathe.

Laurie Notaro 7:51 a.m.

What time do you get up? Don’t you have to be at work? Is your connection down? Because I know you are good with paying bills. Ha-ha! Seriously, I’m getting dizzy.

Laurie Notaro 7:55 a.m.

Wake up! Please! THIS IS AN EMERGENCY!

Laurie Notaro 7:59 a.m.

If you take someone else, I will need my shoes back. I know I said my feet are too wide for them, but I am sure I can get them to fit with a layer of baby oil. We had a deal.

Laurie Notaro 8:21 a.m.

Fine. Leave them on my porch.

And then, like magic, I got an e-mail from
Antiques Roadshow
. My eyes got watery. My heart fluttered as if I had eaten a cookie too fast. Oh, thank God, I sighed. They made a mistake. Thank God. I knew I couldn’t get those shoes on unless I had a saw.

I clicked on the e-mail quickly, sitting up in my chair in front of the computer, and as the e-mail loaded, my eyes darted over the message and I bit my lip.

Deeeeep breath.

“What’s on?” the e-mail asked me.

“Us??” I hoped in a tiny voice. “Us! Us! Us!”

“Biloxi, Hr 1—TONIGHT at 8/7C PM,” the e-mail continued. “In Biloxi, Mark L. Walberg and appraiser David Rago check out the wild pottery of George Ohr. . . .”

It was a newsletter.
Antiques Roadshow,
those scoundrels, those filthy, terrible knaves, had sent me a newsletter on the day they had decided to deny me tickets.

It was savage.

I didn’t hear from Ariane until later that night, after I had calmed down and drank some wine; she had left her phone at home and called right after she saw that I was stalking her, and by now she probably thought I was standing outside her bedroom window with my iPhone in hand, waiting for her to hand over some strappy wedges.

“I have bad news. I checked my number, too,” she said sadly. “I didn’t get tickets, either. And, um, I’m wearing the shoes, so . . . ?”

“It’s all right,” I slurred, trying to be a good sport through my increasing drunkenness. “I’d really have to sever half of my toes to get those things buckled. I’m bummed about the tickets, but at least we tried. I still can’t believe we didn’t get them. I wonder how many tickets those
Antiques Roadshow
varlets gave out?”

“Well, I have more bad news,” Ariane added. “We didn’t
get tickets, but my neighbor, who didn’t even know about
Antiques Roadshow
coming here until I told her, got tickets, and has no idea what to bring, except a carved frog she got in Mexico.”

“Ohmygodihateeugene,” I said in one syllable. “Would she—”

“I already asked her if she would give you the second ticket, and she said no. Her new boyfriend has a bong that Ken Kesey once touched and he’s bringing that.”

“A what?” I clarified.

“Just touched it. Didn’t even put his mouth on it, just a hand. He
passed
it to someone,” she told me.

After a long pause, I could only think of one thing to say.

“I’m going to take an Ambien, eat a box of sugar-free Oreos, and gas myself to death internally,” I said before hanging up.

Ariane, in an effort to be a good friend and cheer me up, tried to get some tickets on craigslist, but the current asking price was two hundred dollars. Apiece. I hadn’t even paid that much for the poster.

“What do you think?” she asked.

I waited for a second to let an Oreo gas bubble pass and then I let it all out.

“You know what? It’s a scam. It is such a con! She’s bringing a frog and people are selling their tickets for profit when
I have Nazi plunder sitting in my living room just waiting to be uncovered? Where is quality control on
Antiques Roadshow
? They get what they deserve, a bunch of wooden frogs and bongs. Scoundrels! Thugs! Crooks! What a bunch of sharks, getting our hopes all riled up and then turning around and giving tickets to people who couldn’t even sell this stuff on eBay! I even do a really good impression of the old lady on the
Antiques Roadshow
commercial guessing the value of the Indian blanket. ‘Six-fif-
tay
! Six-fif-
tay
!’ ”

“I’m really sorry,” my friend said, trying to console me. “I know how much this meant to you.”

“I don’t even want to go on that stupid show now,” I replied. “Even if they gave me tickets today. I hope they get nothing
but
frogs and bongs. I hope it’s one giant day of frogs and bongs on
Antiques Shit Show
! My poster is a star! I’m telling you that my Mucha is the one chance they had at a headliner
and
a new commercial! My Mucha is the new Indian blanket!”

“What?” Ariane asked.

“Six-fif-
tay
!” I yelled into the phone. “Six-fif-
tay
!”

The days and weeks passed. I tried not to give it any more thought. I really did. But on the day I knew everyone who had tickets was descending on the fairgrounds, my hate was a cinder just waiting to combust and blow up that allegedly celebrity-fondled bong right along with it.

“I hope they get nothing but geodes,” I said to my husband as I walked through the living room. “I hope those
Antiques Roadshow
people get nothing but rocks and Cabbage Patch dolls and a bunch of spoons with the names of states on them. Oregon spoons. I hope they get eight hours’ worth of Oregon spoons! Imposters! Grifters! Crooks!”

My husband said nothing.

“Old thermoses,” I said on my way back through the living room. “Fill your time slot with old thermoses formerly filled with milk,
Antiques Roadshow
! And war medals! Pottery from seventh-grade art classes! Snow globes! You falsifiers! Cheaters! Varmints!”

For the record, I’m not really sure who I was calling varmints—the ticket people on
Antiques Roadshow
or the people with the bongs and the frogs. All I know is that I wanted them all to suffer for the fact that I didn’t get tickets and
I had the best thing.
“Maligners! Sophists! Purloiners!”

“Give thesaurus.com a rest,” my husband said, not looking up from his book.

“
Filchers,
” I whispered.

“I’d look up alternative meanings on that one if I were you,” he advised.

“Miscreants,” I hissed.

“You know, if that thing is real,” he said, nodding toward the Mucha on the wall, “then
Antiques Roadshow
just did
you a big favor. If it’s an honest-to-God original poster, you couldn’t have it hanging right there! You’d have to sell it or give it to a museum; it wouldn’t be hanging right
there
in our living room. If you love it as much as you say you do, love it enough to let it be fake. Love it enough to let it stay right where it is so you can look at it every day.”

He was right, I realized. That was the curse of
Antiques Roadshow;
there was no winning either way. If your stuff was worthless, even if you loved it, you now knew it was crap. If it was valuable, chances were it was going to become someone else’s valuable. How many people do you know who would keep an Indian blanket hanging over their couch if it was worth half a million dollars (not six-fif-
tay
)?

Would I sell my Mucha for half a million dollars? Absolutely. Did I want to? No.

So when Ariane called me the next day and told me not to look at the Sunday newspaper, I nodded and went ahead and did it.

“Eugene Show Stop Uncovers Rich Find,” the headline read, and went on to report that a lost Norman Rockwell painting had been discovered at the fairgrounds the day before on
Antiques Roadshow.
Worth half a million dollars.

I saw it hanging at the museum the next time I was there, and the security guard standing next to the painting pointed to me and said, “Can you believe it?
Antiques Roadshow
!”

Either way, win or lose, you give up something.

Several months later, I found a new listing on Google for the Mucha Foundation. After I heard the tinkling of the theme song for
Antiques Roadshow
on the television, I thought I’d show them what for and e-mailed Marcus Mucha, the artist’s grandson, with a letter and some pictures.

It was, he assured me, going to hang on my wall forever.

It was a fake.

Initially, I didn’t believe it and stuck to my guns that the poster was such a unique piece that even the Mucha Foundation had no idea about it. In a way, a small part of me still believes that, although a larger part of me is delighted that when it’s my husband’s turn to pick out a TV show during our joint quality time, I have something better to look at than
Battlestar Galactica.

At least the bong was a bust, too—I don’t think it would have been worth anything unless it could have been DNA-traced to Ronald Reagan; the frog, however, was worth fifteen hundred dollars. Supposedly.

Doesn’t matter. Right now, I’m waiting for a day in May when I find out whether I got tickets to
Antiques Roadshow
in Seattle.

I wonder what twelve new old stock antique mugs are worth.

H
oly shit, there’s a body in there!” my husband said as he looked at me with wide eyes and backed away from the bushes he had been poking at a moment ago.

I shook my head, closed my eyes, and yelled loud enough for all of our neighbors to hear: “You know what?
I hate the yoga people!
I hate them! This is all their fault!”

I was enraged. It
was
all their fault. There happened to be a yoga studio situated behind our house, and apparently, the hedges that lined the back portion of my yard and my neighbors’ became something of an inconvenience to the people who decided to start using our alley as a shortcut into the yoga parking lot. And I was certain to a reasonably certain degree that some aloof and flexible jerkess who could dial an iPhone with a pedicured pinky toe from wheel pose
had reported everyone on my side of the street to the city, because we all received warning letters of complaint. And they wanted the problem addressed.

Our slightly unruly hedges became such a problem for these uptight ladies, who really should just stay home and take Ativan instead of bringing their toxic energy to my street, that I came home one day to find large pink signs staked in the front yards of the neighbors on either side of me. The signs declared their property was a “public nuisance”—which is ridiculous, because either of these homes could be used as a movie set, they were so well tended. I don’t know how I escaped the public staking, but I couldn’t help feeling a little left out.

If the bushes were a little overgrown and a branch had the yearning to reach out and scratch a Range Rover driven by a woman in a tank top and jeggings, I didn’t know, but I sure would’ve laughed if I’d seen it with my own eyes. The alley is not someplace that we wander freely, mainly because it is not territory that belongs to us. It is hobo turf, and as someone who’d rather not have to get a gun safe and stock up on rounds, I’d rather not go out there. Once you step past the back gate and into the hinterlands, it’s like stepping into Narnia, but one that smells like urine and constantly has the clanging of glass bottles knocking together as they jostle about in a freshly stolen Safeway
shopping cart, which I have since learned is the native call of the hobo.

I’d like to mention here that some people have insisted to me that “hobo” is an impolite term, and that I should use something a little more politically correct, like “residentially challenged” or “free-range tenant.” But frankly, I don’t see a problem with the word “hobo,” nor do I understand why some people believe it to be derogatory. I believe “hobo” to have a genteel, jaunty connotation to it; I believe it to be a jocular reference to someone who might have fallen on hard times but is making the very best go of it.

Hobos like Tom Joad, they ride the rails, eat beans out of a can like I did in my early twenties. Hobos are friends with Woody Guthrie. Hobos carve tiny secret messages for other hobos on fence posts along the road. If I had my druthers, I would much prefer to picture my hobo humming to himself, happy all the time, carrying around his stuff in a bandana on a stick and taking a sip from a flask every now and then, than to open my eyes to the fact that a residentially challenged squatter is shooting up methamphetamine in between his toes roughly thirty feet from my back door.

All of the neighbors knew we had something of a diverse population in our alley due to our proximity to downtown and to a Safeway, a hub for cashing in bottles and cans for five cents apiece. Due to their serve-yourself soup bar, Safeway
also became the hobo restaurant of choice, and that was evident by the number of folks with bits of grass stuck to the backs of their flannel shirts gulping down cups of minestrone under the cover of Pepperidge Farm end caps. As a result, I will eat foodstuffs shipped directly from China before I eat anything from that store that hasn’t been hermetically sealed by a machine—and that’s not elitist. That’s just called being averse to open sores on or about the mouth area. I don’t have them now. I don’t want them later because I defied the odds and carelessly dove into a vat of Tuscan Tomato Herpes Bisque.

Still, eat your soup, rummage through my garbage, use my alley as a hobo highway; I didn’t particularly care. You’re a hobo. Even the day that I went searching in the back hedge for my dog’s ball and found something quite different didn’t really upset me all that much. There, tucked into an open space in between branches, was basically a hobo RV—a piece of cardboard, a Little Caesars pizza box, and a bag of empty soda cans that were undoubtedly headed for return at Safeway, followed by a bacchanalian chicken noodle feast.