A Strange Mantra

Last night I was walking through Ogawa Plaza, on my way to get cigarettes and Indian food, when a short, stocky, elderly Asian lady with a wizened face beckoned to me.  Ordinarily I don’t stop for strangers on the street, but this woman seemed harmless enough, and she was interesting too.  She wore a funny cylindrical hat and colorful clothes of coarse wool, like maybe she was a yakherd from someplace super exotic, like maybe Bhutan or some place like that.  So I stopped to talk.

She asked me, “Can you say ’NAH-moo’?”

And so I said, “NAH-moo.”

She nodded slowly, with measured approval.  She said, “Now say ‘AH-mee’.”

“AH-mee,” I said.

She again nodded.  “Tofu,” she said, it being understood that I was to repeat after her.

“Tofu,” I repeated.

“Good,” said the woman.  “NAH-moo.”

“NAH-moo,” I echoed.

“AH-mee.”

“AH-mee.”

“Tofu.”

“Tofu.”

“Okay,” said the Asian lady.

“Thanks,” I said, nodding before turning and walking away.

As I strode off, the woman called out from where she stood: “NAH-moo.”

“NAH-moo,” I called back, over my shoulder.

“AH-mee!” shouted the woman.

“AH-mee!” I shouted back.

“Tofu!” cried the woman.

“Tofu!” I cried back.

Then, as I walked on in silence, the woman, who now had begun following me, yelled sternly: “Keep saying it!”

I kept saying it.  “NAH-moo…AH-mee…tofu…NAH-moo…AH-mee…tofu….”

When I got to the corner at Broadway, I looked back to see if the woman was still monitoring me, but she was gone.  She had disappeared, like a dying wildflower’s loosed petals blown across the valleys by a Himalayan wind.

...out of the worm-hole, into the fire!

Dear Worm,

I’m guessing that a lot of people who write to you for advice are people whose sins and character flaws have gotten them into all sorts of trouble, betrayers and degenerates in hot messes of their own making.  Well, let me assure you that I am not like that.  I’m a good guy.

In fact, I have a pretty good life.  I’m a nice guy with a funny sense of humor that has made people laugh and I’m employed (albeit, underemployed) and my family isn’t particularly unloving or unsupportive.  I like to go to concerts and movies, and I enjoy good food and beer.  I especially like artisan cheeses.  I probably eat a ton of fancy cheese every year.  Like, literally, a ton…two thousand pounds.  Well, actually, I only eat about a pound of cheese a day, but that’s still like four hundred pounds a year.  Somebody once called me a “bon vivant” because I bought so much expensive cheese.

I’m in good shape, though, despite all of the cheese.  That’s ‘cause I power-walk.  I walk around the lake pretty much every other day.  Occasionally I do yoga.  I’d play tennis, too, if I knew anybody who wanted to play.

So “what’s the problem?,” right?  Well, it’s in the romance department, in the bedroom section to be precise, if you know what I mean.  I’ll bet you didn’t see that comin’, huh?   ; )

Actually, it’s not exactly romance that’s my problem.  I’m actually extremely romantic, and I really know how to charm the ladies.  (Also, I’m classically and ruggedly good-looking, which sure doesn’t hurt.  You know that actor, Jake Gyllenhaal?  I look a lot like him.)  Pitching sweet woo has always come naturally for me, and I can usually make a woman feel dreamy in about ten minutes.  I’m able to hypnotize a woman into an erotic languor in which all she wants is to feel my sensuous touch.  It’s like they turn into jelly.  I don’t mean “hypnotize” in a weird roofie way, of course, but in a still-conscious and fully consensual way.  Trust me, it can be very romantic.

No, my difficulties pertain more to the physical aspects of lovemaking.  Now don’t get me wrong here, I’m not impotent.  It’s nothing like that.  It’s my toes.

Over the last decade or so, I’ve had some sort of fungus infecting my toenails, both feet.  At least I assume it’s a fungus.  Nothing’s been confirmed by a medical doctor yet.  (I don’t have any health insurance, and I refuse to wait in line at the Berkeley Free Clinic…I’m pretty sure there aren’t any doctors there, anyway.)  I wouldn’t even call ‘em toenails any more.  They’re more like the material that I imagine a horn is made of, like a rhinoceros horn.  It doesn’t hurt or anything, but they sure are nasty-looking.

Anyway, it’s gotten so that I have to wear socks when I’m in bed gettin’ my sex on.  For a while there I could get away with just dimming the lights, but now it’s to the point where my partner would be able to feel something was wrong even if she couldn’t see the problem.  And the socks are no real solution either, not by a long shot.  Sometimes I wonder if the socks aren’t as much of a turn-off as the bare toenails would be.  I can tell you this: it’s a real trick to feel virile and robust while you’re explaining that you can't take off your socks because your feet are so cold.

So how can I get past this?  I feel like I’m a dynamite catch except for this one thing.  But this fungus is driving ten misshapen, discolored little wedges between me and the ladies.  But I can’t just let this obstacle shut down my love life, can I?  What can I do?

Btw, I think of myself as quite independent — a rugged individualist, if you will — and so it’s really hard for me to reach out and ask for help this way.  But I’m at my wits’ end, Worm.  I need answers!

Signed,

Fungus Upon Nails Got Ultra Yucky

ps.  I’m attaching some pics so that you’ll have a clearer idea of what I’m talking about.

The Worm sez: Wtf; is one of your parents a troll?  That’s fucking disgusting.  Here’s what you gotta do.  First, call 911 and tell them your toes are rotting off and you need medics to come get you right away.  Second, once you’re stabilized, google “obamacare berkeley” and call the first phone number you find.  Third, don’t ever send me any more photos again ever, not under any circumstances.  And know that there’s no shame in seeking help, FUNGUY, none at all.  It’s needing help in the first place that makes you a loser.  Doing without assistance won’t redeem you.

********************

So sayeth The Worm.

Gilligan’s Island Theme-Song Grievance

Location: Hollywood, CA, Offices of Sherwood Schwartz
Time: early September, 1964
Characters: Sherwood Schwartz’s secretary [voice only], Sherwood Schwartz (producer), Russell Johnson (actor), and Dawn Wells (actor)

TV producer and creator, Schwartz, paces his office and nervously sips Scotch.  He returns his glass to his liquor cabinet and closes its doors, and then he goes to his desk and pushes a button on his intercom. [buzzing sound]

Secretary [offstage]: Thank you for waiting.  Mr. Schwartz will see you now.

Johnson and Wells enter Schwartz’s office and close the door behind them.

Schwartz [walking out from behind his desk and toward four chairs placed around a coffee table, gesturing for Johnson and Wells to come join him, which they do]: Hi, guys!  Come, sit.  What can I do ya for?  Want a drink?

Johnson: No, thanks.

Wells: This isn’t a social call.

They all sit, Johnson and Wells next to each other and across from Schwartz.

Schwartz: So what can I do for you?  Jack said he thought you were coming, but he didn’t say why.

Johnson: George played us the theme song this morning.  We were very disappointed.  Why do you think that is, Sherwood?

Schwartz: C’mon, guys.  I know how you feel, but it’s a 60-second song.  We can’t squeeze everything into the opening credits.  At first we were gonna just mention Gilligan and the skipper, not even the Howells, but we realized that we needed Ginger in there for the sex appeal…

Wells: Fuck you, Sherwood.

Schwartz: You know what I mean, Dawn.  You’re just as sexy as Tina, obviously…why do you think we’re parading you around in hot pants all the time?  But Tina’s character has all the glamour…it’s a different kind of appeal…resonates with the females as much as the males.  You know that.

Wells: Whatever.  I was Ms. Nevada.

Schwartz: You are a lovely, lovely woman, Dawn.

Wells: I know a thing or two about glamour.

Schwartz: Be that as it may, the focus groups love movie stars, so we needed Tina in the mix.  And the Howells were easy.  [to GI melody] “The billionaire and his wife.”  Four words and they’re both covered.  That’s all you need to know.  [turning to face Johnson] Nobody cares how Howell made his millions, so we don’t have to explain that he’s an oil tycoon or a financier or whatever.  And his wife is his wife.  But if we say “the professor” then people are gonna wonder what sort of professor you might be.  Are you a philosopher, a jurisprudential scholar, a Shakespearean scholar, what?  We want you to be a professor in, like, all of the sciences, but we can’t explain that…we don’t even want to explain that.  [turning to Wells]  And, Dawn, how could we explain Mary Ann?  If we introduce you as “Mary Ann” it doesn’t speak to the role…so you’re a woman named Mary Ann…big deal.  Tina’s “the movie star,” which is clearly a good thing.  But we couldn’t very well call you “the farm girl.”  We’d have to explain that you were the sweet, upbeat, pretty farm girl, and that you weren’t just some country bumpkin.  We just couldn’t squeeze all of that into 60 seconds.

Johnson: Five words.

Schwartz and Wells: what?

Johnson: You said “the billionaire and his wife” were four words.  It’s five words.

Schwartz: Okay, five words, then.  I play a little fast, a little loose, you know me.  My point remains, though, right?

Wells: Why weren’t we ever consulted when you were producing the theme?

Schwartz: So you wanna write theme songs now?

Wells: Maybe we should, since your team obviously can’t handle it.

Schwartz: Again, Dawn, you can’t fit everything into a 60-second song!

Johnson: Nonsense.  Dawn fixed it in the cab coming over here.  It took her about 45 seconds.  Dawn, how did it go?

Wells: [to new GI melody] “the professor and Mary Ann here on Gilligan’s isle.”  Instead of [to old GI melody] “and the rest are here on Gilligan’s isle,” it’s [to new GI melody] “the professor and Mary Ann here on Gilligan’s isle.”

Schwartz: You just stretched it out, though.

Johnson: No! That’s the beauty.  The [to old GI melody] “are here on Gilligan’s isle” part of the version that George played us is already so stretched out that you can fit [to new GI melody] “the professor and Mary Ann” in without disrupting the meter.  You just lose the word “are,” which was grammatically incorrect anyway.  And the song’s lyrics as they are now linger on too long anyway.  By adding Dawn and I to the list of castaways, you'll fix the song!  And [to new GI melody] “the professor and” and [to new GI melody] “Mary Ann” even rhyme…it’s perfect!

Schwartz [after pausing and rubbing his eyes with his palms as if to refresh his mind but really to hide his angry shame]: But we’re back to the problem of what kind of professor, right?  And who the heck is “Mary Ann”?

Johnson [sighing exasperatedly, then snapping into an encouraging tone]: Like you said, I’m a generic professor!  I’m just “the professor.”  The viewer will soon realize that I’m a generalist in the hard sciences and that I dabble in the soft sciences.

Wells: And who the fuck is “Gilligan”?  If the viewer needs to know who Mary Ann is, doesn’t the viewer need to know who Gilligan is?

Schwartz: They do!  He’s the “mighty sailing man” who works for the brave and sure skipper.

Wells: Well, the lyrics also say “five passengers” in addition to Gilligan and the skipper.  “Five.”

Schwartz: Yeah.  Hence the “and the rest…”.

Johnson: Listen, guys, this isn’t about how comprehensively or precisely the theme song introduces the show and the characters.  This is about billing.  Dawn and I are being under-billed in the opening credits and there’s no good reason for it.  We’re as integral to this show as everyone else.  Dawn and I get as many lines as Jim and Natalie do.  By the way, when they sing [to old GI melody] “and the rest” and you put our photos and names up, is it going to say “as The Professor” and “as Mary Ann”?  

Schwartz [after squeezing his temples, thinking]: Right!  That’s the important part!  Your roles are all equally important, but we just couldn’t fit everyone into the theme song.

Johnson [highly exasperated]: But we just solved that problem for you!

Schwartz [reluctantly]: The song is already in the can.  There’s no budget and no time to go back into the studio.  CBS wanted the song a month ago.

Johnson: So you’re going to fuck us over ‘cause you don’t want to pay for an extra studio session?!  What is that, like, five guys and six hours?!

Schwartz: There are more engineers to pay than there are musicians to pay.  And a new song would take at least two days.  There's no time.

Johnson: Look, Sherwood, I put my career on the line for this project.  I’ve done Hitchcock.  I had a Twilight Zone!  I’m taking a real risk with this, even if I am the straight man.  My career as a dramatist could be over.  Now, the money’s good…I’m here ‘cause of the money and I got no complaints in that department.  But when I get freezed out of the credits, it’s like a signal to everyone that my career is on the decline….”

Wells [standing, to Johnson]: This is bullshit, Russell.  Let’s get out of here.  [to Schwartz]  It’s not just the theme song that’s in the can, Sherwood, it’s most of a season.  Without your farm girl and your professor, you got shit.  It’s too late to change things up now.  But just ‘cause you can’t fire us doesn’t mean that we can’t quit.  Now my agent and my lawyer are talking about this right now, but I don’t really give a shit what they say.  I’m not shooting another episode until that theme song’s fixed.

Wells stands up, nods sharply to Schwartz as an ironic display of respect, and walks to the door.

Johnson [getting up from his chair to follow Wells]: I feel the same way, Sherwood.

Wells and Johnson exit Schwartz’s office and close the door behind them.

Schwartz [still seated]: Aghhh!  [pauses, then resumes tantrum]  Fuck, fuck, fuck!  [gets up, walks over to desk, sits at desk and buzzes secretary via intercom]  Call Marty at legal.  Tell him I want him and every shyster he’s got in my conference room tomorrow at…11.  No, 10.

Secretary: Is everything okay?

Schwartz:  Yeah…just a coupla actors gettin’ too big for their britches.

Secretary: You want some company?

Schwartz: No, not now.  Thanks, baby.  [pushes button to end call, then taps fingers on edge of desk to keep tempo and comparatively hums relevant portions of old GI theme song and new GI theme song]  Fuck! [stands up and walks to the liquor cabinet and opens its doors]  Duh. [end of scene]

A Very Krampus Christmas

Happy holidays to all!  Let us take this season of fellowship as an opportunity to remember that even the worst among us – the kidnappers, the torturers, the child killers, the cannibals, the reprobates of every stripe – need love and can be loved and can be redeemed by love.

Forever Eighties

If I were forced to pick a favorite record of The Smiths, it’d probably be Reel Around The Fountain, the penultimate track on “Hatful Of Hollow.”  (Ordinarily I would put the quotation marks around the song and not the album, but the cover of Hatful Of Hollow just so happens to state its name in quotes and so I thought it necessary to refrain from putting quotes around “Reel Around The Fountain.”  I can’t help myself…I’m a converse anti-symmetrist.  It’s like a religion with me.)  The guitar is so feathery and yet so incisive, the bass alternately scrappy and pretty, always confident.  And, of course, Morrissey carries the melody with panache.  I like the drumming, too, sputtering and a bit nervous.  Great song.

When I was a teenager in the 80s listening to vinyl, I preferred the version of “Reel Around The Fountain” that was featured as the first track on The Smiths’ self-titled album.  Whereas the version of the song on Hatful Of Hollow was basically a live performance (it was a John Peel session), the version that opened the eponymous LP was a relatively slick studio production.  Morrissey’s voice is given echoey treatments, there are subtle but fancy sprinklings of piano, the tempo is a bit slower (and a lot more even) than on the Hatful Of Hollow recording…the studio recording on The Smiths is definitely the more professional and more adult-sounding version of the song.  I suppose that as a teen I craved the measured gait and smooth gloss of adulthood, but now that I’m middle-aged I get a kick out of the rawer, more energetic, more frantic sounds of youth.

I discovered The Smiths when I was 14, and it was a pretty big deal.  Like all adolescents, or at least most of them, I yearned to be cool, and I imagined that, since I felt so uncool, coolness must feel the opposite of how I felt.  And I was a depressive youth, given to bouts of melancholy and fits of outright despair, and so I thought that the cool people must be the happy, self-assured, easygoing, satisfied-with-life people and that the whiny malcontents such as myself were all a bunch of losers and write-offs.  But my worldview changed with The Smiths, who were so clearly cool and yet so unabashedly mopey and pathetic.  The Smiths taught me that I needn’t fear an inability to be content, that happiness was no prerequisite for coolness.  This world may not be right for me, but I could be just what this world needed, the coolest thing in town.  I could be the bee's knees, all the bees' knees.

The Smiths are a particular favorite of mine, but I could go on and on about the 80s rock and pop that helped to forge my identity and values and attitudes about life (REM, The Jesus And Mary Chain, etc.).  I just love 80s rock!  I wish I could go back, like Marty McFly went back from the 80s to the 50s (well, not exactly like that...I'd want to get younger as I traveled backwards in time).  I realize that the 80s weren’t really the best decade for rock ’n’ roll (that distinction would go to the 70s or the 60s, I guess) and I realize that an hour of Mozart or Schubert or Beethoven is worth more than all of rock ’n’ roll put together but, still, 80s rock is the music that has most touched my heart.

Were you born between 1960 and 1975?  If so, I would like to hear your story about how 80s rock inspired/moved/influenced you.  Please post your memoir as a comment to this blog entry.  And don’t be shy or embarrassed.  This is a no-shame zone.  Did you think that Bono and Sting were cool?  Big deal.  Who didn’t?  I doesn’t make any sense now, of course, but those were weird times.  Next to Ronald Reagan everyone seemed cool, and people with one-word names seemed extra cool.  Did you pop your collar and wear epaulettes like Simon Le Bon did?  Don’t worry about it!  Go ahead and post pics if you want.  It’s all good.  It’s all, like, totally good.

A Pirate For Halloween

When I was a child I – like most youngsters, I presume, at least most of the boys – was heavy, heavy into pirates.  Of course I don’t mean the nerds who bootleg media and software, nor do I mean today’s malnourished, seafaring Somali teenagers with flip-flops and automatic weapons and unruly teeth.  I’m talkin’ ‘bout old-school, buccaneer-style, walk-the-plank motherfuckers, the ones with sabers and parrots and striped sox and plumes in their hats, reeling to accordion music and reeking of rum and tobacco.  Aarrrgh!  God bless those guys.  You gotta love ‘em.  They didn’t fit in, so they flipped civilization the bird and they charted their own courses and they took what they wanted…louis d’or, bitches, and lots of ‘em!  It’s all about the napoleons.  Therefore I was a pirate for Halloween almost every year as a grade schooler.  Pirates were awesome.  Who wouldn’t want to be a pirate?

I was also a bookish kid and so I sought out pirate lore, and it wasn’t long before I read that the worst thing that you can call a pirate is “scurvy dog.”  It’s the sharpest insult there is, like when an Arab throws his shoe at you or when a foppish white guy slaps you in the face with his dandy glove.  You call a pirate a scurvy dog and you best be prepared to throw down cuz that shit don’t play.

Then I read that scurvy was caused by a lack of vitamin C and that successful pirates always stocked lemons on their ships so that they could regularly suck their lemons to prevent scurvy.  So I took to sucking lemons ‘cause I thought that doing so would make me cool like a pirate.

It wasn’t long before I acquired quite a taste for my sour li’l pick-me-ups, and I must’ve sucked a couple thousand lemons before I hit middle school.  That was about the time that I discovered the culture’s biases against lemon-sucking.  To tell someone to go suck a lemon was to tell someone to fuck off and go do something silly or unproductive, such as fly a kite or jump in the lake.  And to say that someone had sucked a lemon was to say that someone had woken up on the wrong side of the bed, so to speak, and was being surly or unreasonably disapproving.  When I learned of these slanderous, hateful metaphors, I was devastated.  I suddenly found myself the object of universal scorn, a pariah to be despised and ridiculed.

My shock soon gave way to anger.  Who were these people to judge me?  If they didn’t like juicy, tasty lemons, then fine…but that was no reason to demonize me.  I decided to keep on sucking lemons and to do so with a defiantly conspicuous lack of shame.  I’d suck extra lemons, what the hell…just to spite everyone.  Fuck all y’all!  It’s lemon season, dickheads, so get used to it.

But that didn’t last long.  The peer pressure was too much (kids can be so cruel!), and I soon realized that I couldn’t keep on sucking lemons, at least not openly.  It just wasn’t going to work.  The stigma was too much.  I had enough problems, and I didn’t need to be courting extra trouble.  It just wasn’t politic.

I was caught between Scylla and Charybdis.  Society wouldn’t tolerate me as a brazen lemon-sucker; on the other hand, I was a very social youth and so it was much too inconvenient (not to mention humiliating) for me to always be hiding, sucking my lemons in private.  And so I coped by squeezing lemon juice into all of my foods and beverages.  It was amazing how the same so-called friends who would have savaged me for sucking a lemon would not bat an eye as I squeezed that same lemon’s juice into everything I ate and drank.  Colas, tomato juice, soups, mayonnaise-based salads…you name it, I’d squeeze lemon juice into it.  Indeed, at any given moment one could likely find a couple of lemons in my backpack.  And thirty years later, this is still how I live my life. 

Then the other day I was at the Safeway getting canned soups and lemons.  I had my soups, a chicken-noodles and a beef-barley, and I went to get my lemons.  As I entered the produce section, some phlegm suddenly started tickling my throat and I felt an overwhelming urge to cough.  Yes, mother, I did think to cover my mouth…but I had a can of soup in each hand and my instinct was to not swing a pound of metal-encased soup at my face.  In the next split second, half of my mind tried to suppress the cough and the other half of my mind scrambled for a plan B (such as to cough into my shoulder or arm), but before I could do anything the cough’s spasm overcame me.  It was a mighty expectoration, the kind that wrenches one’s neck muscles and makes one feel as though one’s torso is imploding.  After a brief moment of paralysis, I looked up and caught a glimpse of my discharge mid-arc, a great globule of phlegm shimmering in the fluorescent light.  I tried to follow its trajectory as it landed (I believe) somewhere among the stacked cucumbers.

I quickly regained some modicum of composure, and I went to the cucumbers to try to locate the phlegm.  My plan was to wipe it on my pant leg, or maybe I’d fetch one of those plastic bags (the ones on perforated rolls throughout the produce section) and wipe it on that.  But I couldn’t see anything anywhere…not a gob or a glob or a blob to be found.  I set my soups down on the floor and I started handling the cucumbers.  I figured the phlegm had to be on the side of one of the cucumbers stacked toward the top, or maybe it had slid down from the side of the cucumber and settled onto its underside or maybe onto the top of the next cucumber below.  I began lifting cucumbers, running my palm over shaft after mottled green shaft, feeling each fruit for moisture as I visually inspected the space where that particular cucumber had lain, but to no avail.  Had the phlegm simply kept on sliding on down to the bottom of the pile?  Then I started to get nervous.  I decided to give up.  I looked too weird stroking these cucumbers, and I wasn’t prepared to explain myself if someone were to inquire into my business.

And that’s when I had my epiphany.  It dawned on me that I was a total loser.  I lived an adventureless life, a life devoid of all thrills and derring-do.  I hadn’t swashbuckled in decades, I’d never grabbed fortune by its throat…my life was nothing like a pirate’s life!  And it wasn’t enough to say that I was merely boring; it was worse than that.  I was lower than humdrum.  I didn’t even enjoy the humble dignity of being normal.  I couldn’t even manage to make it out of the goddamn grocery store without grubbing around for my lost ball of snot.  All of my claims to manhood were tenuous at best.  It was time to furl my Jolly Roger and raise my white flag.  I was all washed-up, beached without treasure or pride or sense on a shore where I made even the landlubbers look cool.  I had to face it: I didn’t have what it takes to be like a pirate.

I suppose that my realization that I was a huge loser was enlightening, but I didn’t immediately know what to do with this knowledge, and so I just left.  It wasn’t until I got home that I realized that I’d forgotten the soups and the lemons.

That night was a night of profound soul-searching, and I resolved to not let my demoralizing epiphany rob my life of meaning.  It was too late for me, yes, but I could still help the younger generations hang on to their glorious dreams.  You know what they say: those who can’t do teach.  So I decided that this was to be my destiny.  I was to be a teacher, and my terrible awakening at the supermarket had been my ordainment.  If I couldn’t be cool like a pirate, at least I could redeem myself by helping young people keep hope alive.  And with Halloween coming up so soon, the timing couldn’t have been more perfect!

You see, one of the few foods that I eat without lemon juice is pistachio nuts.  I eat them while I watch TV, and I must go through a couple hundred bags of them each year.  I get ‘em cheap at Trader Joe’s…I always mix a bag of the salted with a bag of the unsalted…lightly salted is the way to go.  Anyway, in every bag of pistachios there are always a few nuts whose shells are completely sealed.  Without a nutcracker, these nuts are virtually uncrackable.  And even if one had a nutcracker handy, one would probably end up smashing up all the pistachio meat while cracking the shell and so it just wouldn’t be worth the effort.  So these nuts are practically useless.  Well, I save these nuts.  All year long, I collect these worthless nuts and then, on Halloween, I give them out to all the little bastards who come around begging for freebies…teach those brats to come bothering me and threatening me just because they like candy and they’ve got some cheap, ill-fitting Spiderman costumes.  Go home and do some homework, you irritating little fuckers!  Who am I, Willy Wonka?  It’s called a liquor store…they sell candy bars there.

So today at lunchtime I’m gonna go to the bank and get some crisp $10 bills.  Then, after work, I’m gonna go to Trader Joe’s and buy some of those giant, footlong Toblerone bars.  When the trick-or-treaters come around tonight, I’ll be ready for them.  Any kid I see who's dressed like a pirate gets a Toblerone bar and a ten-dollar bill.  Everybody else gets to dip a meathook into my salad bowl full of frustrating pistachio nuts.

Imagine all the little faces when little Johnny, the pirate, gets a giant chocolate bar and a sawbuck and everybody else gets a handful of stupid nuts.  Ha!  Pirate school’s in session, kids…Lesson #1 tonight at my house.

Todd Bridges' Ghost

This dream becomes a nightmare every time.  It always unfolds as follows:

I’m in a mobile home with Dana Plato, a couple of days into a speed binge, and it’s hot.  Curtains are drawn across all of the windows, but the sunlight and the heat are pouring in just the same.  The air-conditioning unit is chugging away valiantly.  The calendar on the vertically grooved faux-wood wall paneling says it’s 1990.  We’ve been in there for days, talking and fucking and smoking cigarettes and drinking Gatorade to stay hydrated.

I feel as though Dana is my soul mate.  In the hours upon hours of conversation, punctuated with sex, we seem to have become boundlessly, inextricably intimate.  We’ve plotted crimes together, sworn secrets, and expounded on art, ethics, class, gender, race, family, God, globalism, humanism, liberalism, and pretty much everything else.  I feel as though I know every crevice of her psyche as well as I know the contours of her body, and I love everything that I’m seeing.  Dana is my world; she is everything to me.  And she seems totally into me, too.

She’s in the bathroom, peeing.  I’m naked, on my stomach, lying breadthwise on the bed.  She comes out of the bathroom, naked, and she jumps onto the bed.  Then she settles into the bed, lengthwise on her back, atop a crumpled sheet, with her calves resting on my back and buttocks.

“I wanna try umami,” I tell her.  “You ever tasted umami?”

“What’s that?” asks Dana.

“It’s some new flavor.  Scientists in Japan discovered it.  It’s the fifth flavor, I guess.  It’s supposed to be delicious,” I explain.

“The ‘fifth flavor’?” she asks.  “Aren’t there, like, a billion flavors already?”

“Supposedly there are basic flavors – elementary flavors, like how blue and red and yellow are primary colors.  There were four basics: sweet and salty and sour and…something else.  But now they’ve discovered a fifth basic flavor: umami.  They say it’s the tastiest flavor.  I think umami means 'deliciousness' in Japanese."

“That sounds like bullshit,” protests Dana.  “Deliciousness isn’t a flavor.  At least, it’s not a particular flavor.  It’s any flavor that’s found extremely pleasing.  It’s not even the flavor, really; it’s the pleasingness, the pleasingousity.”

“Yeah,” I agree, “it does sound like bullshit.  I still want to try it, though.”

I roll out from underneath Dana’s legs, and I rest my head on her belly and I stare up at the broken ceiling fan.  My gaze is broken when Dana flops her hand and arm down past my face and onto my chest.  On her inner forearm, near the wrist, are two bright red bug bites, about an inch and a half apart: the mark of the bedbug.  With my left pinky finger, I trace figure eights (figures eight?) around her bug bites.  My figure eight is an infinity symbol – two zeros, one slightly bigger than the other, joined together in an eternal embrace.

“Do you think I’m pretty?” Dana asks.

“Hell, yeah.”

“No, I mean really pretty.”

“Hellz-ya, baby.  You Playboy-bunny pretty.”

“Featured model,” she concedes.

“How could you not know you’re pretty?” I ask.  “You were Diff'rent Strokes’ cheesecake.  You must be in the top one percent of people on the planet who are known for being good-looking.  Remember that one episode when you were in leotards and leg warmers?  Who wasn’t jerking off to that episode?”

“I never felt pretty on Diff'rent Strokes.  I wanted to look like Farah Fawcett, but my cheeks were too full and I was too freckly and pale.  I looked more like Melissa Gilbert.”

“Who’s that?”

“The daughter on Little House On The Prairie.”

“The blind one?”

“No, the other one.  Half-pint.”

“Oh.  But she’s hot, though.  I mean, she got hot, later, when she got older.  She’s hot now, not when she was Half-pint.  I saw her recently on a magazine cover…she’s super attractive.”

I think about how good-looking the actress who played Half-pint is.  The blind sister was really hot, too.  Even the mom on that show was sexy.

“Listen, Dana,” I say, “I’ve only known you for a few days, but I’m perfectly qualified to verify that you are absolutely gorgeous.  You're exquisite.  If Lanny couldn’t see that then he was an idiot.”

“Todd always used to tell me that I was the cutest girl on TV,” Dana tells me.  “I wonder what might have been, what could have been, had I fallen in love with Todd instead of with Lanny?” she asks, sighing wistfully.

Dana’s sigh for Todd Bridges unleashes a monstrous ghost, a ghost from Dana’s past who knows her as I have never known her and whom she understands as she will never understand me, a ghost who will vanquish me and reclaim its place by her side.  Everything – the walls, the bed, the floor, the ceiling, everything – shatters and crumbles and swirls up in great waves of soot that crash down upon me, propelling me downward into the abyss that’s below me, a black oblivion as vague and as vast as Hades.  When I land I will die, and as I fall I am dying.

And then I wake up, palpitating and disoriented and a little bit sweatier and more traumatized than I was when I fell asleep.  I lie there, growing ever colder and more brokenhearted, and I ponder my aloneness and the bitter taste that life has left in my mouth.  And then I remember: bitterness.  The fourth flavor is bitterness!  There is no umami, and the fourth flavor is bitterness.

I don’t know what this dream means.  It doesn’t mean that I’m a racist, if that’s what you’re thinking.  True, there is some black imagery in my dream, but the fact that Todd Bridges happens to be African American has nothing to do with it.  Bridges and his ghost could be Eskimos, Swedes, Aborigines, Basques, whatever the fuck…I don’t care.  I just don’t want Dana thinking about them while we’re all naked in bed together, that’s all.  The dude’s ghost’s race is totally irrelevant.  The whole thing is ridiculous.  Nothing’s really haunting me anyway.  I don’t even think Todd Bridges is dead yet.