FANBOYS

So we're like sitting around a cozy fire in our cozy living room the other Saturday, me and my husband and my sister-in-law from The City, minding a cozy cocktail and our own business, when our voices start getting like progressively louder on account of we can't hear ourselves think, on account of this enormous jet that's passing over the house, now where were we? oh yeah the new dishes, only that's one helluva huge fucking jet, that sound is like pouring down the chimney, anyone want a tad more vino? what'd you say? I can't hear you! that humongous fucking jet is like hovering over the fucking house...

The next time you want to scare the living shit out of somebody, I've got one word: chimneyfire.

Got that?

Chimney!Fire!

We've officially joined the club of that select few who've experienced this outrage. And it was. Outrageous. One minute I'm sitting cozily by the fire sipping Pinot Grigio and speaking Mikasa, and the next thing I know, I'm out in the yard raging at this shape-shifting volcanic eruption shooting out of our chimney. My heart muscle does a 911 as a ceaseless fountain of sparks cascades down the roof and black smoke spreads over the neighborhood like a shroud. It takes fifteen seconds for a crowd to form. Two minutes for the firetrucks to arrive. A week-and-a-half to come down from the adrenaline rush. Not a high I would recommend.

And all I wanted to do was bask in the new dishes. The bowls are practically big enough to fulfill that desire. And the plates, they barely fit in the dishwasher. To accommodate all those mountains of pasta, I guess. Italian Countryside. That's the style. Everything's oversized. Like an Italian peasant's appetite. Like our chimney. Like the bill to fix our chimney.

Like our daughter's backpack. The other morning we needed a wheelbarrow to get the thing out to the car so I could drive her to school. God knows how she got it from the car to her locker. Pulling up curbside at my daughter's school at 7:40 a.m. is like making a pit stop at the Indy 500...seconds is the name of the game, baby. While horns honk and buses bear down like mastodons, she ejects from the car and beelines up the walk as if her backpack were filled with feathers, as if she simply materialized from the ethers like a wishful thought rather than emerged from that rusted-out planet-wrecker at the curb piloted by Phyllis Diller's older sister.

But in the privacy of her own supermax, unseen by human eyes, she's all, "Oh pull-ease, Mommy Dearest, you're so good at Language, pull-ease can you help me with this?"

I have to think a minute. Language? Mine could use a bit of cleaning up, I guess... Then I remember. In my day they called it English. In fact, I actually got a college degree in said English. Although you wouldn't have guessed this the midnight after our house almost burnt down. I was speaking, all right, but in what tongue was anybody's guess. Let's just say I was speaking Italian white -- the other universal language -- and leave it at that.

They're learning shit in sixth grade these days I know I didn't learn until high school. Back when Prohibition was in full swing. For instance, a few nights ago, while my daughter was pounding the pavement at gymnastics, I was pounding the books online to reacquaint myself with the ever-popular compound-complex sentence, a phenomenon possible only with the aid of conjunctions, of the subordinating and coordinating variety, you may recall. And god knows one had better know the difference between the two or risk the wrath of my daughter's Eng...excuse me, Language teacher, Eva Braun. So I printed a list of the aforementioned conjunctions for my daughter's perusal and congratulated myself on being still GC* after all these years.

Perusing the list the next morning, as we careen down the hill in the planet-wrecker toward our scheduled pit stop, my daughter reads the examples of subordinating conjunctions out loud:

BECAUSE, ALTHOUGH, AFTER, BEFORE, WHICH, WHEN, WHERE, HOW

She pauses. "What's this?" she asks. "What's FANBOYS?"

"That," I say, mentally straightening my Cool Mom wig, "is an acronym. Made up of the first letters of all the coordinating conjunctions. Every single one of them!" I have to stop myself from inserting a "fucking" between "single" and "one."

I can feel her staring at the side of my face. A parent lives for these moments. I have to stop myself from smiling. Number One Rule: Don't. Ever. Smile. At. A. Middle. Schooler. (Unless. She. Just. Told. A. Fucking. Joke.)

"That's lame, Mom," she says, and stuffs the list into her backpack and pulls out her cellphone to play Monopoly.

I narrowly miss hitting an innocent bystander waiting for a bus.

"Don't you want to know what the letters stand for?" I say, trying to keep the whine out of my voice. (As opposed to the wine out of my mouth, a losing battle.)

My daughter doesn't answer. Then she yelps, "I just got Boardwalk on a bid for only a dollar! Coo-ool!"

As I turn left at the light, I can hear the cellphone tooting its little self-congratulatory horn. At the curb my daughter struggles to pull her backpack out of the planet-wrecker and then manages to swing it onto her shoulder with seeming effortlessness. Watching her, my heart bumps in my chest. For no reason other than love. Plain dumb unutterable grammatically-incorrect love. Then, at the last second, before she can stop herself, before she beelines into another day of adolescent angst, my daughter peers through her bangs and smiles. At me! Phyllis Diller's older...but momentarily reprieved...sister.

Then she's gone, and so am I, chugging back up the hill into another day of middle-aged ennui, with a smile lodged in my throat and an acronym in my brain, which I keep repeating to myself, one conjunction after another, until finally I'm over the hill, until finally it comes to me, simply materializes out of the ethers like a wishful thought, how I wish I had greeted the firefighters when they arrived to vanquish the volcano erupting out of our chimney, how I might've thrown wide the door of my imperiled citadel and exclaimed,

"GET OUT THE FAN, BOYS, AND BLOW THIS FUCKING SMOKE OUTTA HERE!"




(*grammatically-correct)

gobble, gobble

Nothing's For Sure

Now I just wanna join a fan club or something, start my own or something. I've been Made in America just like every other fucking asshole who thought something was fucking wrong with the fucking TV. After all the raging and posturing and badmouthing and bird-flipping, I'm as American as the next guy, as the next Sixties throwback who started inhaling and didn't stop and dropped out and grew her body hair and waited tables and left her college diploma in the trunk with the spare tire and ran away from one home after another and four decades later for some ungodly fucking reason got addicted to the fucking Sopranos, who'd watch the whole fucking thing all over again, duck to duck, except now I've been through the fucking ending, it's fucking over.

Except it's never over.

Now I'm going through my fucking closet, it hasn't been gone through since the Carter administration, someone has to do it. It's taking days and weeks, a lifetime, the stuffing out of me, the patience of a saint. I'm making piles to take to the shelter, every pile's a chapter, it's the story of my life. I can't believe I wore this shit. I can't believe I saved this shit. I can't believe I fit into this shit. This whole undertaking is a study in shades of black. Speaking of undertakers, doze guyz always wore black to da funerals and dere wuz a whole fuckin lot of em.

Nothing's ever over.

Last night I'm serial-dreaming, one after another, and in the middle of it there's a stove and a pot on the stove and it's boiling over and I rush to save it. Then this morning in real life I'm heating coffee in a pot on the stove (camp coffee my father called it) and it boils over and I rush to save it and it's deja vu all over again. I wonder if my father would've liked The Sopranos. Once during the Nixon administration I took my father to see The Sting. I was proud of my new car with the Wankel engine and the diploma in the trunk, only I wasn't paying attention, I ran over a sign. "What the...?" I say as the car hiccups and a One Way pops up in the rearview mirror like a jack-in-the-box. Soon after I get a divorce and my father liked the movie.

Except when it's over.

I read in the paper where one brother shoots another brother but misses the deer, sometimes there's justice. But don't get your hopes up, the second brother was only wounded. Last winter at The Cabin we found an antler on the path then another in the spring by the old outhouse like postcards. My husband is going to France next summer, he wants to take me to France next summer, I'll send postcards. During the Eisenhower administration I used to talk in a made-up language so people would think I was from France. I went to Morocco during the Ford administration which says it all.

My daughter says it all, then says it again, it's called backtalk. She can walk backwards talking backtalk and chew gum at the same time. I talk back to the screen when it goes blank. "What the fuck?" I say, "Fuckenay!" I say, "This is fucked!" I say, then the credits start rolling like my daughter's eyes when she's chewing gum walking backward backtalking, and I just got made. Where did I fucking learn such language, not from my father, that's for sure.

By Any Other Name

An acquaintance of ours recently had a baby, a girl, and I mentioned to my daughter that they'd named it Martha.

"That's a fat name," she said.

"A phat name?" said I.

"Like Brenda, or Gloria, or Abby," said she. "A fat name."

A bit slow on the uptake, with an audible Phhht! my synapses suddenly fired.

"Ohhh, a fat name," I replied. "Like, the name of somebody who's fat."

I felt like I'd secured the $32,000 level on "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire." My daughter stared at me a nanosecond longer than usual before her eyes rolled up into their sockets. And no, she wasn't having a seizure. It's that involuntary adolescent twitch she's been battling. For well over a year now. Unsuccessfully, I might add.

It got me thinking (another audible Phhht!). About the shelflife of names. These days, who in their right mind would name a newborn baby Harold? Or Rodney? Or Phyllis? I mean, I'd rather be stuck in an elevator full of Madisons and Coopers than one lone Ralph. You can pretty much guess what a Madison's MO will be without jeopardizing too much gray matter. But a Ralph would be highly unpredictable. There's no telling what a Ralph might do.

To begin with, a Ralph is probably pissed off about the name. And you can just imagine the kind of background a Ralph comes from. What sort of parents would name a newborn baby Ralph? The kind who'd have named it Eunice as an alternative. Come to think of it, have I ever actually known a Ralph? I have known a Harold. And a Rodney. And a Phyllis. Guess which two were fat names.

As for myself, I always wanted to be a Leslie. Leslie was my fantasy name. Yeah, yeah, I know. Obviously a spaz name for a boy. But I'm not a boy. Yet.

When I was my daughter's age, I used to lie in bed at night fantasizing I was a famous teenage movie star named Leslie. Just that single name, like Cher, or Bozo. I had hair past my waist and a horse and lived in a mansion in California with my ten brothers and sisters. I was very famous and very cute but too young to date. I spent my time swimming in an enormous pool that completely encircled my mansion and making movies. Periodically a handsome bystander would have to rescue me from some disaster. The disasters included, but were not limited to, tidal waves, earthquakes, cyclones, tornadoes, and kidnappers. The handsome bystander always fell in love with me as he carried me, always unconscious, from the jaws of death. But it was always in vain, because, as stated, I was too young to date.

This is the kind of fantasy life only a person with my actual name could conjure up. Which is sort of a book name. A bags-under-the-eyes-from- too-much-reading name. Possibly a spinster-aunt-with-ink-stained-fingers name. You get the idea. It's certainly not a name one would lie in bed fantasizing about. Unless perhaps one were named Eunice.

And what about all these girls named Michael? Or Darrel? Or Hunter? What's up with that? Maybe I missed something, but I'd call those squirreled-out- of-your-ever-loving-mind names. Does-the-word-postpartum-depression- mean-anything-to-you? names. In fact, I'll bet $32,000 there's at least one female Ralph out there. And I'd give anything to meet a girl named Stanley. Hey I know, let's start naming our boys Debbie, or Joy.

Where was I? Oh yeah, fat names.

I thought it was an interesting observation on my daughter's part (bordering on creative genius), but I disagree with her examples. For instance, I wouldn't consider Brenda a fat name. Or Gloria. Margaret, maybe. Ethel, for sure. But then, my daughter and I are a generation or three removed from one another. I have trouble imagining how the world looks to a girl her age. Or so she reminds me. On a daily basis. Make that hourly.

I wonder if my daughter has a fantasy name. I'd ask her, but I'm not up for another faux seizure just now. Sometimes all the eye-rolls and the What-EVer!s and the Were you alive when (fill in the blank with the pre-1920 event of your choice)?s finally get to me, and I crave the self-centered naivete of my childfree days. Crave it like a drug. Of the Class A narcotic variety. Of course, by my age, one has figured out that the drug thing doesn't really work, either. Not that this changes anything, per se. Hey...what about Per Se. A sort of female version of Percy. It's pretty phat. And definitely not fat.

Moonwalk

In case you didn't notice, we had a full moon last week. In Taurus. I'm not sure what that means, except I'm a Taurus. Maybe that's why I felt compelled to venture out.

I glanced through the third-floor window and there it was, the moon. Beckoning like a steroidal frisbee. Next thing I knew, the dog and I were sneaking out the back door on our way to the cemetery, where we wandered in the moonshine amongst the graves like a couple of ghosts. The perfect antidote to a grueling day with the three-year-olds.

(The Gentle Reader may recall the blogger's latest foray into the land of gainful employment is as a teacher of preschoolers.)

Today in school we made button people for our afternoon art project, and one of my little charges -- let's call her Janie -- was determined to put a special button on her button person's "bagina." That's a soft "g." Janie intoned the word in a happy chant and swung her legs and studied her paper doll until, with a squeal of recognition, she glued a bright blue button on the anatomically-correct spot and, that accomplished, announced she was finished with Art and would be returning to her preferred subject, Playdough.

Correct me if I'm wrong. Kids are different nowadays.

First of all, playdough didn't even appear on the scene until long after I'd graduated to necking in cars. I was weaned on that moist gray school clay that smelled like feet and Rodney Heikala was fond of eating. Rodney had white hair and black glasses and always chose my head in Duck-Duck-Goose. He ran like a spaz and drooled when he talked and gave me a handmade valentine signed "U R THE 1 4 ME!," which resulted in my being forced to fake-barf whenever he tried to partner up at line-time until finally he got the hint. It took awhile.*

Then there's the "bagina" thing.

I can just picture little Janie's little mother oh-so-politically-correctly pointing out to her inquisitive toddler the difference between boys and girls. A "Father Knows Best" meets "Reality TV" moment. I mean, I didn't even know what a bagina was until I discovered I had one (see above, re "things to do in cars," but let's not go there).

I do distinctly remember asking my own mother where babies came from. I was in the bathtub at the time, playing with the Toothbrush People. As opposed to at the table, playing with the Silverware People (the knife was the father; the big spoon, the mother; the fork, the son; the little spoon, the daughter). The question concerning babies just sort of popped out, like an afterthought, or a baby. Instantly, the air in the bathroom changed. You could cut it with a toothbrush. My mother paused, and in a voice quite unlike the one she'd been using, informed me that babies were a gift God gave you when you'd been very very good (as opposed to very very bad, as in the case of Linda Flann, but let's not go there).

Then there was the time I oh-so-casually asked this same mother some vague pleasure-driven question having to do with "down there." This time she was putting me to bed, moving about the room picking up clothes and pulling curtains shut, when she stopped dead in her tracks as if she'd suddenly been electrocuted. You could practically smell the flesh burning. Only it was my flesh. Or it would be. Eventually.

But. Speaking of stopping dead.

Today is El Dia de los Muertos. And if the Mexicans are right, I'd better get with the program. Maybe tonight, when the Daughter Spoon is drifting off to dreamland and the Father Knife is sequestered in his tower, I'll take the Pickle Fork Dog for a walk. To the cemetery, like last week. I'll make sure to bring some leftover Halloween candy to satisfy the food requirement, and carry a flashlight in lieu of a candle.

Only I might not need a flashlight. Even though there won't be a full moon, in Taurus or anywhere else. Because maybe tonight, on this Day of the Dead, as we wander in the wane amongst the graves, some real ghosts will be there to lead the way.





(*I should mention Rodney didn't make it out of his teens, some congenital thing. All things considered, I'm probably going to Hell when I die. Only I don't believe in Hell, so I'll probably be spending my last days chained to a wheelchair, gesturing like a spaz and drooling when I talk, in some Old Folks Home in Iowa packed to the rafters with Fundamentalist Christian bowhunters playing Duck-Duck-Goose. And they'll never choose me.)