When You Are Engulfed in Flames

by David Sedaris

To this day, should any of our boyfriends demand a back-scratch, my sisters and I recoil. “Brush yourself against a brick wall,” we say. “Hire a nurse, but don’t look at me. I’ve done my time.”

Like any normal fifth grader, I preferred my villains to be evil and stay that way, to act like Dracula rather than Frankenstein’s monster, who ruined everything by handing that peasant girl a flower. He sort of made up for it by drowning her a few minutes later, but, still, you couldn’t look at him the same way again.

My sisters and I didn’t want to understand Mrs. Peacock. We just wanted to hate her, and so we were relieved when she reached into her closet and withdrew another back-scratcher, the good one, apparently.

“A bow tie announces to the world that you can no longer get an erection.”

For the first few weeks that we lived in the apartment, Helen clearly preferred Hugh over me. “My boyfriend,” she called him. Then the two of them got to talking, and she switched her allegiance. I knew I’d won her favor when she invited me into her kitchen. Owing to her Sicilian blood, Helen had an innate gift for cooking. This she boasted as she jammed meatballs into a frozen store-bought pie crust. Then she drowned them in a mixture of beaten eggs and skim milk. “My Famous Italian Quiche,” she called it. Other dishes included “My Famous Eggplant Parmesan with the Veal in It,” “My Famous Tomato Gravy with Rice and Canned Peas,” and “My Famous Spaghetti and Baked Bean Casserole.” If Helen’s food was truly famous, it was so in the way of sun poisoning and growling dogs with foam on their lips: things you avoided if you knew what was good for you. If I was super-stoned I might wash the sauce off a bit of veal and eat it atop a cracker, but, for the most part, her food went straight into the trash can.

Shit is the tofu of cursing and can be molded to whichever condition the speaker desires. Hot as shit. Windy as shit.

Since when do politics affect a mammal’s ability to sustain a flame?

In Paris the cashiers sit rather than stand. They run your goods over a scanner, tally up the price, and then ask you for exact change. The story they give is that there aren’t enough euros to go around. “The entire EU is short on coins.” And I say, “Really?” because there are plenty of them in Germany. I’m never asked for exact change in Spain or Holland or Italy, so I think the real problem lies with the Parisian cashiers, who are, in a word, lazy.