The Idiot Girl and the Flaming Tantrum of Death (5 page)

That, however, was nothing, I felt, compared with the story of a massage therapist who had just returned from some other parasite-ridden landscape and was giving a massage to a client when she suddenly felt something “cold” in her panties. Curious, she excused herself and went to the bathroom, and when she pulled down her pants—pardon me, my gag reflex is threatening to resurface the gyros I just ate for dinner—deep breath. Deep breath. Deeeeeep breath. Kittens are so cute, aren’t they? God, kittens are cute. So cute! And puppies. I love puppies. They should have a cute-off, kittens and puppies. I really don’t know who would win, to be honest, puppy breath or a kitten chasing a fly? Um, okay, back down the hatch. I’m just going to have to write this very fast—when she pulled down her pants, a worm flipped out and landed on the floor. A worm. A WORM. I, myself, taking a cue from the Unabomber, would have tried to hang myself with those panties AT ONCE and WITHOUT DELAY, because I’m sorry, having knowledge like that is no way to live. I was born in Brooklyn, New York, for a reason, and that reason is that New York has a very good water-filtration system, which enables its population to rest easy knowing that worms won’t launch out of their panties when they go to the bathroom.

Now, it is true that I had a dream in which I was in Africa, sitting outside a tent, and it was very hot when I looked down and I saw something pink and folded just sort of heaped there, and I thought to myself, Is that…? Nah. Couldn’t be. Could it? Oh my God, it is. It is. Goddamn it, my vagina just fell out! And I didn’t know what to do, because how do you stick something like that back in? A vagina isn’t a Lego, it doesn’t just snap back into place with a playful push and a
click
! But it was just lying there in the dirt like a little pink wind sock. I knew it would be bad to have a dirty vagina, so I picked it up off the ground with a stick, then approached a man in a white coat, presumably a doctor, to see if he could put it back in. But when I tapped him on the shoulder, he, unfortunately, turned out to be Noah Wyle, and then I was just too embarrassed to ask him to help me return my genitals to their rightful place, so I put my pink wind sock in my purse with the intent of finding someone significantly less attractive to give me a hand with it later. It’s true, I had that dream, and honestly, it is a struggle for me to look in the mirror every day knowing that in some imaginary realm, my cookie fell into the dirt like a pork chop breaded in filth and hay particles. I have to deal with that. But apparently, this massage therapist was not raised a Catholic like myself but most likely in a much looser, “Sunday-only” religion like Protestantism, because she pulled her pants up, picked that worm off the ground, stuck it in her pocket to show it to her doctor later, and went right back to work without being bound by even the thinnest thread of shame.

Now, I only
watched
that show, and every time I felt the smallest little tingle, tickle, or hair moving on any part of my body, I would have to stop from tossing myself into a bleach vat or in front of a flamethrower, convinced that I had a colony of Georges tearing across my scalp in a worm race or that I had a tapeworm the size of a reticulated python trying to sneak out my back door. For weeks after, my diet streamlined down to foodstuffs that could not be found in nature, such as Oreos, Diet Coke, Funyuns, and anything else that supported a parasite-hostile environment and consisted solely of chemicals and cancer-causing agents. In the bathroom, I could barely touch the waistband of my underwear without having a full-blown “flippy worm” panic attack. And then, when I was finally beginning to forget about the butt worms and Georges of this world, my husband and I were at dinner at one of our favorite restaurants—a wonderful ramen place around the corner—when I took too big a mouthful, attempted to bite off the noodles I couldn’t accommodate, and while almost all of them splashed back into the bowl, one curly, white stray ramen noodle fell onto the table, at which my husband pointed his fork and then said simply, “Did you wanna put that in your pocket?”

So it is easy to understand how all of the sympathies I once had for that man have evaporated, and how utterly simple it was for me to completely ignore him when he vocalized his concern for my newfound fear of germs and viruses. If he couldn’t take the lurking danger seriously, then I had to focus on myself. I was concentrating on germs. From now on, I decided, shaking hands with people was out of the question. Instead, I would just say “Nice to meet you” and then wave at them energetically or blow them a kiss. There was no way I would touch a public door. The surface of a doorknob holds a lottery of sickness, not to mention bits from people’s bodies. I used a paper-towel shield or pushed the door open with my rear end, since that area is usually protected by a very firm and impenetrable butt shaper, and germs seeking refuge down there would simply bounce off of the industrial-quality Lycra.

Touch a handrail on an escalator? You’ve got to be kidding! Those things are nothing more than conveyor belts of pestilence and filth, serving up a buffet of maladies and horror that would rival any petri dish in the labs at the Centers for Disease Control. Grab on to one of those things and you’re toying with unleashing the Apocalypse. Then we have shopping carts equipped with handles acting as flu and cold lightning rods, and don’t forget about airplanes, which recirculate air, creating a fan that spews out a wind tunnel of various afflictions. And if I ever heard someone cough, I’d sprint the other way like an Olympic athlete on some very good drug that her coach told her was flaxseed oil.

But it was on a plane ride to Eugene, Oregon, after spending Christmas in Phoenix, that I really became a true and devoted convert to germophobia. Now that I live in a small town, the planes I take reflect that small-town John Cougar Mellencamp size and are basically Fisher-Price toys with car engines controlled from the ground by a baggage handler with a joystick.

We all crammed on, all of us Fat Christmas People on a tiny plane, and that was when the symphony began. The coughing. The sneezing. The sniffling. It didn’t help matters that we were leaving Arizona, the state that was currently having the worst flu outbreak in the country—so bad it was a top story on CNN’s headline news. Now, I know people have to travel home whether they’re sick or well, and I can’t argue with that. But what I do take issue with is when the breathing cadaver in the seat behind me coughs and coughs and coughs hard enough that I feel his lung g-force hit my head and it makes MY HAIR MOVE. That cough had the wind-tunnel action of a Dyson and was easily strong enough to push-start us down the runway. And it was grotesquely apparent from the unmuffled sounds that the coughs had been released with reckless abandon—there had clearly been no obstacle to their discharge into the world. The man behind me was an open-mouthed cougher. No hand action to shield the rest of us from the germ cloud rushing from deep within his lungs—not even a Kleenex to provide a thin, flimsy barrier.

To make matters worse, he wasn’t the only one; the plane was full of them. And I don’t get this; I mean, really, where are these people when Dr. Gupta says it again and again on every news show, “To help prevent the spread of disease, wash your hands, cover your mouth, and stop blowing your nose on your Tommy Bahama shirt”? Do they not get the Discovery Health Channel? Did they not know of Holly’s plight? Who are these open-mouthed coughers? In which dark corner of society do they live? These people, I assume, must be these the same ones who leave pee on toilet seats and let gum simply fall out of their mouths onto the sidewalk. Being sick is not like e-mail—you don’t need to spread it around to a hundred people to have the gods shine on you or get better. Keep your death rattle at home, I say, because I don’t want it. In fact, I think making people stay at home when they’re contagious should become a national policy. Sickness has the same properties as people who look at porn on the Internet. Keep it where it belongs, in private. No one wants to know your secret, and no one wants a visual.

For some people, however, that might not even be enough. For repeat offenders, for all of those selfish people who continually cough and sneeze on others when they’re sick, I believe we need a quarantine unit set up. If you simply can’t manage to raise your hand six inches to cover your gaping cavern of illness, go ahead and skip that step. But the next time you commit that offense it will be in a whole roomful of renegade nose-blowers and other open-mouthed coughers just like you who can infect each other repeatedly instead of contaminating the healthy population. If you sneeze once or twice, well, that happens, but more than that, it’s the sickroom for you. And when you’re quarantined, you’re
quarantined.
There will be a special sick restroom, complete with receptacles in which to dispose of your snot rags properly, like a bonfire, and yes, there will be excessive pee on the seats. And, so the sick can eat, there will be a sick vending machine, outfitted with already contaminated buttons.

And it was during that flight from Phoenix back to Eugene that I made myself a promise: I would never, ever, let myself be that exposed in a such a turbulent atmosphere again without recourse, showered continuously with microscopic particles of infection just searching for a new orifice to invade and set up shop.

I spent the rest of that flight with my napkin acting as my sad interpretation of a SARS mask, covering my nostrils as best it could from the germ shower being shot at the back of my head, and when I got home, I did the only thing I could do: I went online and bought two cartons of bird-flu masks. And then, several days later, I came down with a cold that quickly turned into pneumonia and made my lungs crackle like a bag of Tostitos being danced on every time I took a breath.

And with the memories of the Christmas flight and the two weeks I spent in bed crackling, I did not feel one bit bad, weird, or overreactive as I looked at the woman sitting next to me as she open-mouthed coughed on me one last time, then reached into my purse and prepared to snap that bird-flu mask over my head. Not one bit.

But before I could get the mask securely over my face, I was hit with something silent but deadly and oh so potent, heavily spiced with yesterday’s broccoli and sauerkraut, something that I was sure came shooting from the octogenarian sitting next to Typhoid Mary, rising up in a toxic attempt to smother and kill us all.

Oh God, I thought as I held my breath. Someone help me. I’ve seen
that
Discovery Health Channel show, too.

Love Thy Neighbor

I
f the envelope
had been delivered to the wrong address, I would have torn into it with glee. But it’s never a happy event to get a letter from the police department delivered to the right address.

Yours.

Standing next to the mailbox off my front porch in the middle of summer, I held the envelope in my hands and wondered as a wave of dread washed over me. No one ever gets a nice, happy letter from the police department unless it begins with the words “Good news! The charges against you have been dropped!”

And then I breathed a sigh of relief.

How stupid am I? I laughed. Duh. I knew exactly what the letter was, because I had gotten several of them before. It had to be a notice that I was being fined because the alarm on my security system had gone off without reason. Much like the last time I was charged $150 because the alarm had sounded when a thief tried to kick in my back door, failed because of the dead bolt, ran away when the alarm went off, and was gone before the police got there three hours later. In the rule book of the Phoenix Police Department, apparently, if the hoodlum fails to gain access to your home and flees the scene but leaves a calling card of a split doorjamb, a footprint on both your back door and the door to your storage shed, you owe the city of Phoenix a nice little nondeductible donation/early Christmas gift. In the time it took the police to respond to the alarm that someone was breaking in to my house AND WAS BREAKING IN NOW, the thief could have entered my house, surprised me on the potty, tackled me as I tried to shuffle to safety but fell because of the pants around my ankles, hit me over the head with the Bigfoot mug my husband gave me for my birthday, then skinned me like big game with the paring knife in my Henckels set (which he was going to steal anyway), wore my skin like a dress around the house, watched
Death to Smoochy
on DVD, and farted into my couch cushions before he realized how boring my house was and left because it turned out that the $2.84 in coins he found scattered all over the hallway floor from my pants pockets was actually sufficient to buy a value combo meal and a shake at Jack in the Box.