Someone in this Story is Gregor Samsa

While sitting on the sofa the other night, watching the Colbert Report, my mirth was shattered by a piercing scream from another room.

Chiara.

I leapt from the sofa and ran toward the shriek, to the kitchen, all the time crying out “Chiara!? Chiara, are you okay!?”

There, in the kitchen, Chiara was paralyzed with fright.

I grasped her hands and asked her what the matter was. She pointed to a narrow gap between the fridge and the wall.

“What is it?” I asked.

“A aneemal!” she shrieked.

(She nearly always calls all living things simply ‘animals’ - insects, spiders, lobsters, snails, mice - it makes it exceedingly difficult to steel oneself appropriately for whatever variety of household critter removal one might have ahead of oneself.)

With a silent, frustrated eyeroll, I poked my head around the corner of the fridge. Sure enough - an animal. It was a big cockroach looking thing. The size, perhaps, of a circus peanut. I had no idea how to proceed.

I was afraid to try to spray it with an insecticide, thinking that it would simply dash under the fridge before I could deliver a lethal amount of poison. I was equally afraid to reach back there and squash it with a paper towel - what if it jumped on me? I quickly determined that Chiara would not allow me to use any of our kitchenware to capture it. I was in a pickle.

I went back to the fridge to see if the little bastard was still there. On closer inspection, it was belly up on the linoleum, its horribly articulated legs curled in a final supplication. But ominously, as I watched for any signs of life, its antennae waved gently.

I knew not if they moved by operation of the last spark of life granted the miserable creature or from the slight flow of air created by our central heating. I secretly feared it was only resting in some mockery of mammalian sleep and would leap to attention and arm-crawling-on as soon as its reverie was disturbed. I reached toward it tentatively with the broom.

It was as dead as a coffin nail (as Dickens would have it). I swept it into a specially prepared zip-lock bag and sealed it tight. I resolved to have an exterminator out the next day to whom I would show the insect. Hopefully something could be done about the army of its friends I imagined watching from under the broiler and from behind the dishwasher and inside the vents.

The exterminator’s name, when he arrived the next day, was Ken. Ken took one look at my trophy and pronounced it an oriental cockroach. Basically solitary, Ken assured me, they live outdoors and only come inside by accident or to get out of a deluge.

Ken offered to spray around the perimeter of our apartment so as to dissuade any other oriental cockroaches from coming in. While he did so, he talked.

Ken has horrible stories that we will never have. He has horrible bee stories and ant stories and raccoon stories and termite stories. He knows which restaurants to merely avoid (he wouldn’t tell me) and which to avoid like the plague (all the fast food places).

I gave him a glass of water and he said a curious thing: “I don’t want to drink out of your glass because I am sick.”

Did he imagine that I would drink from that particular glass before washing it? Did he have some sort of disease that dishwashing couldn’t thwart? Whatever his reason for trepidation, he was quickly cured of his worry or his disease as, by the time he finished refusing the water, he had already begun to drink thirstily.

As he was leaving, I pressed him to reveal what he described as “the worst job I ever been on.” He hesitated, but having brought up the topic himself, he was cornered. It involved an opossum, he warned me.

An opossum? What’s so bad about them?

“It was stuck in a drainpipe when I got there, wriggling and twitching,” he began. “I put on my gloves and reached down to pull it out. I grabbed it and gave it a tug and it just tore in half. The whole thing was filled with maggots.”

Then he left. I didn’t shake his hand.

I went upstairs and tossed the cockroach in the trash and then covered him with a layer of crumpled paper towels so that I wouldn’t have to see him every time I threw something out in the coming days.

Sic Transit Pestilentia.

A Smell of Satisfaction Prevails Throughout

Bertrand Russell relates a story told by William James:

A man found that whenever he was under the spell of ether he knew the secret to the universe but, when he came out of it, the secret was lost to him. Finally, after enormous effort and many failed attempts, he was able to write it down one afternoon after it came to him from the ether. When he had slept off the effects of the drug, he looked to his note. It read: A smell of petroleum prevails throughout.

I don’t know about that, but a bottle of port is a delicious companion on a lazy afternoon.

It also does wonders for the sounds of a melismatic travesty wafting in from another room when one’s wife is watching American Idol and one is trying to listen to the Luna album Penthouse.

By tradition, port is always passed to the left around a table (to port, as it were). If ever the passing is suspended, it is considered bad form to ask the person then possessing the bottle for the port directly. Rather, one should ask the person who has the bottle whether they know the Bishop of Gloucester (or anywhere else). If they reply that they do not, one should then inform them that the Bishop is a nice fellow, but he never remembers to pass the port.

It seems unclear what one ought to do if the person so queried does, in fact, know the Bishop of Gloucester (or anywhere else). Engage him in a conversation about bishoping?

Alternatively, you might switch to a drink that is less fussy about decorum.

Barring that:

Try the Fonseca 20 year old Tawny or the Taylor Fladgate 10 year or the Dow's Colheita.

Please enjoy them with a P.G. Wodehouse novel.

On the Platypus, Bitches

1. Although it is a mammal, the female lays eggs. The only other mammal to do so is the (related) echidna.

2. It maintains an average body temperature well below that of all other mammals - about 90 degrees fahrenheit.

3. Its ‘duck-bill’ is not a bill at all and does not open. it is their nose, more or less, and the mouth is underneath. Also, as adults, they have no teeth.

4. The platypus is one of the only venomous mammals. The males have spurs on their back feet which deliver a powerful toxin that, while probably not fatal to a human, can cause excruciating pain lasting for months.

5. You might think (as I did) that they are about the size of a beaver or river-otter - that is, more or less the size of a smallish dog. In fact, they are tiny. They are scarcely larger than a small housecat. And that includes the tail and everything.
6. The platypus uses electrolocation to hunt for its prey, sweeping the sensitive bill back and forth underwater to detect the tiny electrical currents given off by the muscles in the bodies of small crustaceans and the like. It is the only mammal known to have such a sense.
7. When the animal was first taxidermied and brought back to europe, naturalists were convinced that it was an elaborate hoax.

8. The plural is not “platypi” as this is a Latin-style plural and “platypus” is a greek word (it means flat-foot). The correct plural is either "platypuses" or "platypus" or even "platypodes." (Incidentally, this is also true of octopus, another Greek word often incorrectly given a Latinate plural.)

Italian Night Terrors

So Chiara has a lot of nightmares. Incubi, in Italian.

The fun part about her nightmares is that she’s also one of those hilarious people who talk in their sleep occasionally; a somniloquist.

If you are the other person in the bed, it is a little like an old radio program, dimly received and tuned into in the middle of the plot. I often lie awake, propped on an elbow, debating whether to wake her and soothe her, or to wait it out and see if anything funny happens.

I usually wait it out. Funny things often do happen.

Once, I awoke to her mewling and twitching beside me and was about to wake her with comforting words, when she began speaking.

“Dracula!” she cried in what seemed to be real terror, “Dracula!”

She often has nightmares about Dracula. How adorable is that? It is like having nightmares about Frankenstein’s monster or the Creature from the Black Lagoon. It’s ridiculous. What could be less genuinely frightening than Dracula? Bigfoot, maybe?

I let that dream run on until she just fell back into a calmer sleep of her own accord.

Another time, I came to bed much later than her and my final preparations for sleep must have stirred her up somehow. She sat up like a bolt and began berating me in Italian. She wagged her finger and furrowed her brows and yelled and prattled in a rush of vowels and consonants that I was completely unable to translate at that speed.

Her eyes were open. I assumed she was awake. I asked her repeatedly to slow down. I reminded her that I don’t speak Italian well enough for this and that I couldn’t understand her.

Eventually, after it ran its course, she just flopped back down onto the bed and slept.

That was the first moment at which I realized she had never been awake. In the morning she had no recollection of any of this. I still have no idea what she was so mad about.

Usually her nightmares only manifest themselves as a kind of faint whining sound and the occasional full body spasm. She frequently has dreams where shadowy figures (often Dracula) are suspended directly above her or are following her through dark spaces and drawing ever closer to her. She tries to scream and finds she is paralyzed or rendered mute. The noises I hear are the sounds of her trying so hard to scream inside her head that it leaks out a bit.

It sounds horrible, I know. But the things she wants to scream about!

Lately she is managing to actually cry out - loudly - in the middle of a nightmare. The other day it was because she was in her childhood home and there were people in it that she didn’t recognize.

Alright. That's creepy I suppose. But last night the topper:

I wake up with a start; Chiara is shrilly screaming. I hold her and softly repeat to her that everything is okay, that it is only a dream, that I am here - the usual ameliorative things one says in these circumstances.

I ask her, after a long moment of peace, what her dream was about. She tells me she’ll talk about it in the morning. So this morning I ask.

Here, in her own words, in its entirety, is Chiara’s description of her terrifying dream:

“There was thees table . . . and behind eet . . . I saw the top of a bald head!”

I Cannot Return to the Nursery

I have a problem.

The guy at the Armstrong Nursery Center on Pacific Coast Highway thinks I am someone I am not. Though it’s partly my fault, I suppose, I can never go back there. I will have to drive fifteen minutes out of my way and purchase plant food or flowers or terra cotta pots or whatever at another location.

I don’t see any other solution.

I was dropping by with a soil sample to inquire about some funny little white bastards living in the pot of my lemon tree.

(Turns out they are soil gnats. There’s a spray you can get.)

The manager is a nice guy, although a little lispy; it grates on you if you hear it for too long.

Anyway, as I’m waiting for one of the high school kids who work there to retrieve my gnat-killing spray, the manager guy says to me “So how is that avocado tree doing?”

But see, I don’t have an avocado tree. Never did.

I’d tell the guy, except that he’s made this mistake once before and I didn’t hear the question or something and said "fine." So now he, in his mind, correctly associates me with avocado trees, but I still don’t have one.

I decide I have to fix up this confusion.

So I tell him that my avocado tree is doing fine but is not making any avocados. He asks what kind of exposure it gets and I say southeast. That’s the problem, he says. I agree.

Then, he asks me if I still work at Boeing.

I am not going to lie to the guy. A houseplant mistake is one thing - he just misremembered what kind of plant he sold me - no big deal, but a mistake on this order suggests he has confused me with another person altogether. So what do I do?

Naturally, I tell him no, I don’t work at Boeing still.

But before he can ask me about my kids or my boat or my trip to Senegal, I get out of there. And can you imagine if he saw me with my wife instead of the woman he might imagine me to be married to?

But obviously that will never happen because I can never return.

Fuck.

The Jennifer Dispatches: My Father versus Cheese and Bread

My sister relates a story of my father on Superbowl Sunday:

Halftime. The family sits around a coffee table laden with snackfoods and appetizers. My father voices a complaint:

“Next time, we should really make some plans for dinner and not just snack. We should have some protein for dinner. I’m tired of having Cheese and Bread all the time. We should have gotten those ribs at the supermarket.”

My sister responds: “We weren’t going to just snack for dinner. Mom ordered a pizza.”

“More Cheese and Bread! Why would I want more Cheese and Bread?!” cries my father.

“Well then why don’t you go to the supermarket and buy those ribs?” asks my sister, foolishly.

“I don’t want to go all the way out to the store to buy the ribs! I just don’t want to eat any more Cheese and Bread! All we ever eat is Cheese and Bread since you came here! This must be your doing!”

“Are you talking about the hors d’oeuvres? There isn’t even that much Cheese and Bread,” says my sister.

This is the last straw apparently. My father leaps from the sofa and hunches himself over the coffee table. Extending one of his stubby index fingers he points violently at a bowl of French onion dip and its companion plate of Ruffles brand potato chips.

“Cheese and Bread!” he exclaims

He jabs his finger at a pate.

“Cheese and Bread!”

He, predictably, stabs his thick digit into the wedge of jarlsberg.

“Cheese and Bread!!”

Even the bowl of sweet pickles is not immune from his wrath.

“Cheese and Bread!”

He punches with his finger at a bowl of Cheetos. He’s almost perspiring with the force of his hate.

“Cheese and Bread!!”

The twin bowl, filled with Fritos.

“Corn Chips! Just like Pizza!!”

My sister, always the glutton for paternal punishment, interrupts my father’s reverie of rage.

“How are corn chips just like pizza?” she asks.

“Shut up!” responds my father, “I’m speaking to your mother!”

My sister announces that she is going to go work on her art history paper. She goes to her room and does so. Later, when the pizza arrives, she leaves her room to find my father, perched stone-faced and alone at the dining room table eating the enormous porterhouse steak and gargantuan baked potato that my mother prepared for him.

My sister went into the living room and finished the game - and the pizza - with my mother.

To an Anonymous Punk, My Rebuttal

The other day, in the parking lot of a bookstore, I strolled by a small group of militant old-school punks drinking on the hood of an old beater. These guys were classic. Mohawks, studded leather, overweight girlfriends.

I wanted to walk as near to them as possible as I passed them on the way back to my car because I wanted to communicate to them (my blazer and flip-flops aside) that, in some cosmic sense, I was one of them.

Or anyway, I wanted them to know that I sympathized with them enough to not avoid them outright. I tried to emit early Ramones vibes at them as I strolled by plucking the price sticker from my book of Sontag essays.

The lead punk, his primacy evidenced both by his size and his possession of the plastic jug of vodka, greeted me with a “hey, man!” and I returned it with vigor.

“Isn’t this a magnificent evening?” he offered up lankily.

I replied that it was, but beginning to question my wisdom in instigating the exchange, I veered slightly and made for my car as casually but as quickly as I could.

The punk had a parting query for me and I’ve thought of it intermittently since:

“Don’t you wish everything was free?” he asked me in his hale timbre.

When I climbed into my car (a convertible), I took especial care to turn down the volume on the Belle and Sebastian song then playing on my stereo; I didn’t want to offend or rile the punks.

I muttered something supportive to them and drove away.

Afterward, I made for the dinner party I was attending that night at the Hometown Buffet.

I'll let that sink in.

The terrors were legion.

The place shared a wall with the 99cent store. Pay at the door and then take as much food as you like.

Lemme give you the tour: Here’s eggs. Here’s pot roast. Here’s spaghetti with ketchup. Here’s a vegetable - no, wait, that’s a chicken finger.

At one point a woman (one hopes) in a large bee costume sat down next to me and gave me a sweaty hug. The pilling felt of the costume’s gloves was used to caress my cheek. The black tights of the outfit had pooled around her ankles and spilled over the oversized sneakers. The smell was reminiscent of nothing so much as the ancient t-shirt I once discovered under a seat cushion on a houseboat.

Point is, I desperately wanted to be somewhere expensive as all sin. I think that punk had the wrong of it; I don’t want everything to be free, I just want to always have enough money to dine at an establishment where I can eat food that hasn’t been sitting under a lightbulb for a week and a half and takes less than an hour to chew.

But you can’t say that kind of thing to a punk, not when you have a haircut like I have.