Read The Potty Mouth at the Table Online

Authors: Laurie Notaro

Tags: #Non-Fiction, #Humour

The Potty Mouth at the Table (7 page)

BOOK: The Potty Mouth at the Table
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“It’s okay,” he said, nodding. “Lots of people get motion sickness. You can stay here and I’ll bring your stuff down.”

Thank you,
I thought to myself,
thank you for not thinking I was a junkie and just a big dipshit spaz who forgot her
Dramamine
. I would have kissed him on the mouth if the situation had been a little different, or if I had just brushed my teeth. Or at least if I hadn’t just rinsed my mouth in a train bathroom sink that was dirtier than the dress I had just changed out of.

And there I stayed for the next seven hours while that rotten little falafel ball bounced around and contaminated my system with food poisoning and chased me to the bathroom every twenty minutes. It didn’t care that I was on a train. It did not care one bit. I sweated with fever, shivered with chills, and, when needed, assisted elderly and relatively immobile people to their restroom (which was cleaner than the one I had used and big enough for company), although I drew the line at helping with waistbands. I drew the line at unzipping flies in unfamiliar bathrooms, even if people with crystal meth hidden in their crotches were higher in the pecking order than I was.

I could barely sit up; my abdomen felt like I had actually used the Living Social coupon I bought for six Pilates classes but let expire because I hadn’t lost enough weight to show myself in leggings yet. I had reached my lowest point of existence, I had very little else to lose.

“Begging: be at the train station @ 5,” I tapped on-screen as I texted my husband in words I could not bring myself to speak into a cell phone, “bcwause cj=hances are good to
excellnt that I waill have beensittign sideways for hours aftr I have shit mt pants. No longer a variable, but a cwertainty.”

Before we pulled into the station in Eugene, the conductor did me one last solid and gave me this tip: “If you want to put your suitcase by the door in five minutes, you can wait there and be one of the first passengers off,” he said kindly. “That way, you won’t have to see anyone.”

“Thank you,” I said gratefully, and did just that. I was moments away from a clean escape when I looked at the person standing next to me and my mouth fell open.

“Oh my God,” I said to the adorable Korean college student. “I’m so sorry. It was mostly creamer, I swear. I’m so sorry!”

Then she smiled back at me and said, “It’s okay.”

And I looked at her and really wanted to reply, “Well, I wish you would have said that about eight hours ago when you looked at me like I was a little dead girl with long wet hair who just climbed out of a well,” but then I realized I was just about to throw up in front of her twice, so I ran into the bathroom again.

When I came out, most of the train had emptied except for the lady with the oxygen tank who already had her fingers curled around an unlit menthol cigarette. I didn’t wait for her. I climbed down off the train into the heat of the afternoon and insanely bright light. I saw my husband and
walked toward him, but he didn’t see me until he was close enough to enter my splash zone.

“Honey?” he said to me, his eyes squinting, unsure if the green-hued creature who had just stumbled off the train with crumpled clothes, crazy Charles Manson hair, and vague traces of red lipstick smeared upward toward her right nostril was indeed his blushing bride.

“Get me to the car,” I mumbled, fighting the temptation to lie down right there on the gravel along the tracks.

In a moment, we were heading for our house. We live three minutes from the train station. I was going to crawl into a motionless bed in a dark room as soon as I got there and gag without being judged by humanity. I was going to gag for the sake of gagging—gagging just to feel alive. In the meantime, on the way home from the train station, my husband looked at me sympathetically as he slowed down for a yellow light.

“My poor girl,” he said, as he tapped his hand on my leg and shook his head.


What the hell are you doing, you idiot?
” I screamed as I sat sideways in the passenger seat, a nausea wave away from baring my teeth. “Did you not get my text? Run that goddamned light!
Run it now!

When I wasn’t throwing up during the next two days, I was curled up in bed like a tiny zygote in my dark little
room, and it took me the rest of the week to sit up without help. And even though the scars of public vomiting will take a while to heal, I know that two things will never change:

I hate falafel’s stupid chickpea guts.

And every fifteen minutes when I hear a train whistle a mile from my house, I want to throw up.

WRITERS’ GROUP

I
have read Harry Potter erotica. Sometimes, life is like that. In one moment, you’re getting ready to read what you think will be a fun little short story about a magic girl and boy and in the next, Ginny and Draco are getting it on during a study session. And three days later, while I was sitting at a small table in a cafeteria, surrounded by people I did not know, it was my turn to say something about the story to the person who wrote it.

Half an hour earlier, when I entered the cafeteria, I felt nothing but complete terror, even though I was just here on assignment from a local newspaper as an experiment. A social experiment, if you will, that raised the question of how status changes perception in art and culture. My story was only a segment of a larger feature that included what
happened when a principal ballerina went for a dance audition and how the work of a renowned and respected artist was received at a street fair; I was asked to write a piece about how a published author would fare in a writers’ group.

I had agreed to join this writers’ workshop comprised of people I’d never met and submitted an essay for their critique. Yes, I was scared. Some writers are lovely people, but more often than not, they become insecure and
Hunger Games
competitive when hierarchy is being established in a room with more than one writer present; it’s like watching wolves hash out a pecking order before tearing into a fresh kill. It is rarely pretty, and someone usually gets too drunk and is found hours later unconscious and uncomfortably close to a litter box.

I know this because I am a writer. By trade, occupation, tax forms, you name it. This is how I’ve made my living for a long time, decades. But none of that history has any bearing at this cafeteria table. Here, I am simply a girl named Laurie who is waiting for her essay to be led up to the workshop altar. And if the aisle up to that altar involved discussing Harry Potter porn—which I still don’t get—then so be it.

“Well,” I say to the woman sitting next to me, “it feels like you just had a lot of fun with this.” And then I smile. I think she wants me to say more. I simply can’t. Because Ginny and Draco and their naughty bits have already taken
a front-row seat in my brain, blocking access to the fifty-seventh password for my iTunes account. And that is a bad thing: now I’d have to contend with images of randy wizards getting it on every time Hipstamatic comes out with a new lens to download.

“But is it
commercial
?” the older and most likely retired man across from me in the hat insists.

“Absolutely,” the author replies. “
Fifty Shades of Grey
was originally
Twilight
fan fic.”

Fan what? I don’t know what she means and have to ask what fan fic is. The group looked at me like I was insane.

“By commercial, do you mean you intend to publish this?” I ask earnestly. “Because there might be some copyright issues with characters created by someone else.” Specifically, the richest, most famous author on Earth, who I wouldn’t want to tangle with in a court of law, lest everything I own, including my dog, end up in a van delivered to the Rowling house to be disposed of or used as cauldron kindling.

“I checked it out,” she assured me. “It’s a gray area.”

“Oh,” I said.

“You sure do use the word ‘pussy’ a lot,” the man in the hat comments. Out loud.

“I’m playing off the cat in the room,” the author defends.

I am dizzy. I have just read an NC-17 version of Harry
Potter and now an older man who I have known for fifteen minutes has uttered a word that I have been trying desperately to skip through all eleven pages of the Hogwarts porn. This is the same man who asked me when I first arrived what kind of stuff I wrote and asked for a hard copy. “First-person narrative, humor,” I replied with a shrug.

He scanned the first paragraphs and then looked at me over his reading glasses. “Humor? Really?” he said as he handed my essay back to me, his face blank.

I am still feeling a little faint when we move on to the next writer, another older man with thick glasses who produces a book cover he has just paid a graphic designer to produce. It looks fantastic, although kind of young adult, with a photo of two pretty young girls and a dog in a hat.

The older man in the hat takes up the charge. “You lost me when the dog is writing a letter to the girl about how she needs to open herself up to people more,” he says to the older man in the glasses. “Dogs would never do that. A dog needs to earn your trust; he never just gives it away. That’s dog nature.”

“No, no, no,” the man in the glasses disagrees. “I don’t agree. You forget that the dog is her dad, but her mother is a robot, so she has the DNA in her, too, that has no emotion. Her dad is just trying to balance that out.”

“I think your cover is awesome,” I say.

The man in the hat is not going to give up. “I also—I also don’t understand why the dog is suddenly putting on a sports coat,” he says, looking annoyed. “Where did the sports coat come from?”

“The dog wears clothes,” the man in the glasses says, clearly irritated.
“That’s clear from the beginning of the chapter.”

The next writer up is a woman about my age who arrived a little late, popped open her laptop, and began nodding as comments were made about her piece—which consists of the first five chapters of a novel about a film consultant/demonologist who I suspect is about to have sexual relations with a lady ghost. But I like it. There is not a single cat in the whole thing.

Others, however, find fault in several paragraphs, calling them “infodumps.” (I have to ask what that is, too.) Apparently, it’s when a writer gives information in a block of text, otherwise known as “backstory.”

“Actually, I found your dream sequences to be very well paced and subtly done,” I say. “I love the part when he blurts out that he used to be a priest. I was surprised!”

The woman looks at me and smiles. No one agrees with me.

Now it’s the man in the hat’s turn, and the Harry Potter lady tells him how helpful the character list was in navigating
through the chapter, and when I see it, it’s an entire page of characters. I’m guessing at least thirty. That’s a lot for a book, let alone a chapter.

“So while I think that your opening paragraph is great with description, the next paragraph had such a vivid image with Mamoud removing his bronze, unadorned helmet,” the man in the glasses says to the man in the hat. “Maybe you could switch those paragraphs and open with that picture?”

The hat goes quiet, although his eyes dart to the man in the glasses.

“No,” the hat says.

I’m no psychic, but I suspect that in the coming weeks of the writers’ group, there is going to be a tussle that results in one or possibly two older men on the ground with broken hips.

“Why are the two clans at war?” I ask. “I would love to know that right up front so I can understand the conflict better.”

The hat laughs at me. “You have to read the whole book to find
that
out,” he discloses.

“Oh.” I nod.

“I loved the image of the slaves gnawing at the hides,” the Harry Potter lady says. “And the space in the mouth where the rotten teeth have been pulled.”

“I think at the next meeting, we should read our chapters out loud instead of reading them beforehand,” the demonologist writer suggests.

“Oh, I don’t think I can do that,” Harry Potter says in a spray of nervous laughter. “My next chapter is rather steamy. ‘Death Train’ cannot be read aloud!”

“I think that’s a great idea,” I offer. “I find the most problems when I read my stuff out loud. And it’s good practice if any of us is lucky enough to do a reading somewhere.”

“I am never doing a reading,” the man in the glasses informs me. “Absolutely not—I would never agree to a reading.”

“Oh,” I say, and nod understandingly.

And then it’s my turn. I brace myself, already nervous, at the oncoming barrage.

All faces go blank when Harry Potter asks for comments on my piece.

“I didn’t read that one,” the demonologist says.

“I didn’t, either,” the man with the glasses says.

“I only read that copy you handed me,” the man with the hat says.

Harry Potter crinkles her brow, shrugs, and says, “Well, I glanced through yours and had a problem telling where the rising and falling action was, but I guess I didn’t upload your story to the website. Maybe we can do yours next time.”

“Oh.” I nod.

“All right!” Harry Potter says with finality. “So we’re reading aloud next time? I’m warning you—get ready for ‘Death Train’!”

And with that, everyone puts their notes away and the demonologist closes her laptop. Several people stay behind to chat, but I stick my folder in my bag, say thank you to Harry Potter, and then leave, feeling vastly insignificant and exhaling a terrific sigh of relief.

THE ACCIDENTAL PROFILER

I
t was ten in the morning and already the temperature was ninety-seven degrees. Waiting at a stoplight in Scottsdale at a very affluent intersection, I could see the heat rising off the asphalt like a moiré. Arizona heat, even in its infant stages before the temperature hits one hundred degrees, is unforgivable. It makes you feel like a piece of meat about to be thrown on a grill. Even I was sweating, sitting in my air-conditioned car that hadn’t yet been able to recover from the hours it had been baking in the driveway since sunrise. I had nothing to complain about, however, because directly across the street on the corner was a short man holding a giant sign for a shoe and luggage repair shop in the strip mall behind him. His head was tucked under the crook of one arm; he was trying desperately to shield himself from the relentless, white heat.

BOOK: The Potty Mouth at the Table
2.83Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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