The Potty Mouth at the Table (6 page)

The good news is that I did not say the first thing that popped into my head: “Holy shit . . . that’s a bloody cupcake.” The bad news is that I did say the second thing that popped into my mind, which was “You’ll never make enough money in your lifetime to get that thing removed.”

After a stunned silence in which ten pairs of eyes were on me, including those of the proud bearer of the curiously behemoth cupcake, I had drawn a showstopping blank. Looking at them, I was stunned.
Really? “Amazing”?
I thought to myself. Our friend just ruled out any chance of running for Congress or, however unlikely, walking a Christian Dior runway, and all you guys can say is
“Amazing”? Everyone was staring at me, and for a moment I was very confused, until I finally
got it.
Ha-ha. They were playing a joke on me. It was a joke—
a joke!
A wave of relief washed over me as I laughed at myself and replied, “Oh, thank God. It’s just a decal from Hot Topic! For a minute I was scared shitless you really had a flaming cupcake etched on your back for all eternity!”

Except no one laughed back. I caught a couple of them looking silently at each other, clearly as stunned at my response as I was when I saw the Chernobyl-size cupcake. And then my friend, the one who now had a flaming cupcake etched on her back for all eternity, turned around, and with the same flames shooting out of her eyes that she had on her back, told me sharply, “It’s
not
a decal.”

We didn’t talk much after that. She didn’t speak to me for . . . well, really, ever again.

The lesson here is that a giant cupcake tattoo is typically an indication of two things: (1) Sister got her hands on some crystal meth, and (2) Sister smoked that crystal meth and kept smoking it until she had been awake for seven days and then stumbled into a tattoo parlor with a really bad idea that she had quickly sketched on a napkin from Carl’s Jr.

If your friend pops up with a gargantuan flaming cupcake the size of a hubcap or medium-weight primate tattooed on her back, without question, throw her into the
nearest cargo van and get that girl into rehab.
Now.
That’s really your one and only option.
¹
All I ever say now whenever anyone reveals a tattoo to me, whether it’s an earlobe-to-collarbone declaration of “Child of the King!” scribed in Old English–type letters (exclamation point and quotation marks included) or a hummingbird that looks more like a protozoa, is, “Oh, wow. That’s amazing.”

1
. This would be aside from generally advising against a back tattoo, especially since tattoo “artists” have figured out you have just paid for something the quality of which you will never be able to determine with your own eyes.

I
t’s three o’clock in the morning, I’m in a Seattle hotel room, I’ve already thrown up eleven times, and the only thought left in my head after evacuating the rest of my system is:
Jesus Christ, I hate falafel
.

I didn’t even want to order falafel. I didn’t. I wanted to order chicken tikka masala or saag paneer at the Middle Eastern/Indian restaurant, but I only had an hour before a reading and I couldn’t, in good conscience, go and talk to people with saag paneer hanging ominously on every breath I expelled. So I went with falafel; it’s a safe bet, I figured—cute, contained, and, added bonus, fried! Falafel can do little to no damage, unless you count the bed of shit-tainted lettuce that it lounged upon like a concubine in a harem.

With the first bite, I had sealed my fate; by midnight, I was living the nightmare of every traveler: sweating, shivering, and leaning over a toilet in a hotel room like Kate Winslet in
Contagion,
the only movie in which she kept her shirt on, mainly because her character dies before she can get in a compromised situation with a married man.

I would have gladly taken off my shirt in front of everyone who was still alive at my thirtieth high school reunion if I could just stand up for two minutes without having to run to the bathroom like a star on
Teen Mom
hoping to score another cover of
In Touch
with rumors of another unplanned pregnancy. I was still sick by morning and, without a minute’s worth of sleep, had a decision to make: call the front desk and arrange to stay another night in a hotel I could not afford, or suck it up, get myself together, and take the train home as planned.

It was then that I devised one of the worst strategies in the history of mankind. I decided that if I could keep coffee down for an hour, I was good to go for the daylong train ride back to Eugene. True, ninety percent of the coffee was French vanilla coffee creamer—which I do believe is Oil of Olay with corn syrup—but with hot tap water and a pack of instant Starbucks, I constantly strive to make things more disgusting than they ever need to be.

And in an hour, I was okay. Not so much as a gag went
down or came up in those sixty minutes—so I packed my stuff, brushed my teeth, and called for a taxi. I was so relieved I would be home in eight hours that I could hardly stand it; all I wanted to do was sweat in my own bed and drool on my own pillow.

Things were going great until I was standing in line waiting to get my ticket when I suddenly shivered and realized I had pitted out with a flash episode of perspiration that I call the IRS Sweats, the kind of horrifying chill that envelops your entire body, like when you realize you owe the IRS so much money that you have to make
payments.

Positive I looked like a junkie with flop sweat bubbling on my face, I scanned the room to see whether anyone had noticed . . . until it occurred to me that I was in the Seattle train station. Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever been in the Seattle train station, but I’m sure it will be a nice place someday. There will come a time when tiles won’t be missing from the walls, cracked and dusty plaster won’t fall from the ceiling, and yellow
CAUTION
tape will not stretch from crumbling wall to crumbling wall—but that day has not yet come. It does, however, make a convincing backdrop for any film featuring a drug addict/hooker/runaway character; in fact, it’s the kind of place that can send anyone immediately into withdrawal. From anything.

I looked like the president of the Junior League compared to some of what was standing in line with me at the train station. In fact, I would have made a cash bet that if I suddenly yelled “Does anyone have crystal meth?” at least five people within twenty feet of me would have reached into their shoes or pants immediately. I got my bearings as the flash sweat passed and I reassured myself that once I got on the train, I would be fine. I just needed to sit down and stay down. At the ticket counter, I booked a window seat, waiting for the moment when I could rest my head against the cool glass, close my eyes, and finally sleep.

Once I walked up the tiny staircase to the upper level of the train, I found my seat, and the relief from knowing I was on my way home actually did make me feel a little bit better. I leaned my head against the window and sighed as the train started to move, slowly at first, chugging back and forth as I got closer to my own bed and my own toilet foot by foot. Jostle by jostle. By jostle. By jostle.

The first wave that rose up from my stomach only hit the bottom of my ribs and I prayed it was a gas bubble or a heart attack. I ate fried food, I told myself. It could totally be a blocked artery! I took a deep breath and tried to focus on the attendant now one row behind me, taking tickets. I got mine ready to hand over and planned to immediately make
my way to the bathroom. Just to splash water on my face. That was all. Just some water.

I was
not
going to throw up.

Do
not
throw up.

Do not.

Fifteen seconds later, the next wave reached my neck but apparently did not have enough strength to surge through the several chins that I have. However, I was keenly aware of the danger that was inching forward, about to strike. I can outrun this, I told myself. I just need to give the attendant the ticket and I can run to the bathroom. I just need to hold it together for a minute. A minute is all I need. Just a minute and then everything will be fine.
A minute is all I need.

But the conductor was busy flirting with three college girls, two sitting across the aisle from me and one next to me. I summoned all the psychic powers that I falsely claimed I had at seventh-grade slumber parties, but my fake telekinesis bounced right off the conductor and back into my face, which my hands were now covering.

Because I would rather give birth in front of people than throw up in front of an audience. At least in the former case you get to be on your pick of Lifetime shows or at minimum in a heartwarming human-interest segment about how even on a train full of strangers, everyone came together to celebrate life and paused for a second at the wonderment of it
all. But vomiting in front of people? No one wants to hold that. No one cries because it’s beautiful. No one can really get mad at you if your placenta splashes on their purse, but you know what? You know what happens when you throw up in front of a hundred people? Despite the fact that your hands don’t know what to do except hold your mouth, as if they could effectively catch the horror threatening to spew, that third wave finds its force and rushes up like it’s about to eat an Indonesian beach. And then, as if someone has just punched you in the back, before you know it, a half cup of coffee—with an excessive amount of creamer in it, I might add for the sake of detail—is suddenly riding the express car up, up, up, waiting for the signal of the most disgusting noise ever made to sound the horn of attack. It is that noise—that primitive, guttural, pathetic gag,
ehhhhh-ggggg-kkkkk
—that grabs the attention of the roughly ninety-nine people seated around you and turns their collective heads toward you to see who exactly is making that disgusting, animalistic sound.

And if there’s one thing to take away from this story, if there is one lesson to be learned, it is that you should never cover your mouth with your hands in an effort to contain the spill, because that is both useless and foolish. Fanned fingers cannot catch vomit, but what they really can do is turn your little half cup of coffee (again, mostly creamer)
into a spray-water feature in a fountain that rivals the Bellagio’s and make it appear that your digestive system is hooked up to the city’s water supply.

To be clear, I threw up on no one but myself. The coffee all landed in my lap. But that didn’t stop the woman two rows ahead of me from screaming like she was on a Greyhound bus and she just saw someone get decapitated. And it didn’t prevent the adorable, flirty Korean college girl sitting next to me from shooting out of her seat as if the severed head had just plopped into her lap, shrieking at full murder volume, “
I wanna change my seat! I wanna change my seat!
”

You can do a lot of things in front of people, even things unseemly, but as long as they don’t see it, it’s pretty much okay. The blame will always fall on the nearest baby or a person in a scooter. But it turns out you can’t throw up. You can take your pants off and shoot amniotic fluid out toward them, but you can’t hurl, not even on yourself. Even if the Linda Blair impression you have just performed for your fellow commuters is not your fault but rather the handiwork of an evil fake meatball, even if it’s just liquid and a smaller amount than any sample size you’d get at Costco. The horrified gasps from the other passengers will fall on you like a judgment. Trust me when I say you will not know what to do in the ferocious hush that follows your public
humiliation. Trust me when I say you will be frozen and stunned, like a fawn that just saw its mother get shot and then dragged onto the hood of a Chevy Silverado. Chances are good that you will simply sit there, your hands still positioned over your slack mouth. You will be stunned as if you have been through a war, and not just any war but the really,
really
bad kind, like a war of the Eastern European variety, as in Ceauşescu-level trauma.

After what feels like a generation has passed and other passengers and the conductor have still not stopped staring at you, the urge to flee will finally trigger, and 198 eyes will watch you gather up the hem of your dress like you have just been collecting vomit apples, and those eyes will follow you silently as you scurry down the aisle, other passengers recoiling on all sides as if you were handing out said vomit apples.

Dripping in puke, I staggered down the tiny train staircase and found my suitcase at the front of the car, pulled another dress out of it, and skulked into the bathroom, where I hid/vomited/sobbed/hid/vomited/sobbed for the next hour. And in some measure of good fortune—the only measure of good fortune in this story—when I finally emerged from the bathroom, which was smaller than an airline bathroom and filthier than a port-o-potty on the New Jersey Turnpike, the handicapped car was to my right. I slinked into the quiet
darkness of the car, slid into an unoccupied row, and tried my very best to die.

Shortly after I took refuge in the handicapped car, where no one had seen the atrocity I had committed, the door slid open and the same conductor stepped inside to collect tickets. My cover was blown. After a brief and inappropriate thought that I should pretend to actually belong there by sitting on a leg or snatching the oxygen tank from the seat where its owner had left to go on a smoke break (and I am not kidding)—after all, I was wearing a different dress since my performance of Hurl Girl—I surrendered immediately when he came to my row. He made sure to keep his distance in case I was about to launch another splashdown, and before he could say anything, I fell on his mercy. I didn’t even have my ticket anymore; it had fluttered to the ground when I scampered to the bathroom and was now resting, soaked in coffee but mostly French vanilla creamer, under the seat of an appalled, visibly shaken witness.

“I’m so sorry. Please don’t make me go back up there,” I begged him. “Please. I’m really sorry.”