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Like a lot of pet owners I know, Lisa is certain that no one can take care of an animal as well as she can.
“Absolutely not,” he told me. “Almost never. So go on, David, pick up your Glock.”
Her second shot was even closer. “Lisa, you’re a natural,” Lonnie said. “OK, Mike, now you give it a try.” I looked around, confused. “Excuse me?” He handed me the .38. “You came here to shoot, didn’t you?” I accepted the gun, and from then until the time we left, my name was Mike, which was more than a little demoralizing. Not getting the “Wait a minute—the David Sedaris?”
I told him that in England a man was sent to prison for shooting a burglar who was breaking into his home, and Lonnie’s jaw dropped. It was as if I’d said that where I live, you have to walk on your hands between the hours of six a.m. and noon. “Now, that’s just crazy,” he said. Turning to the fellow next to him, he asked, “Did you hear that?” Then he turned back to me. “I’m telling you, Mike, sometimes I don’t know what this world is coming to.”
I’ve yet to see a bumper sticker picturing a fencing sword and the words COME AND TAKE IT or THINK TWICE. BECAUSE I WON’T.
National Review
“Gee willikers!” you could imagine him saying, if that were the name of a video game in which things blew up and women got shot in the back of the head.
You might not realize it this morning, but thirty years from now, you will pull out pictures of yourself taken on this day and think, Why did nobody tell me I was so fucking attractive?
when you’re on your deathbed, or at least, say, sixty-one,
Two. Choose one thing to be terribly, terribly offended by—this as opposed to the dozens or possibly hundreds that many of you are currently juggling.
The one that claimed our place in September 2018 was Florence. Hugh was devastated, while my only thought was What’s with the old-fashioned names? Irma, Agnes, Bertha, Floyd—they sound like finalists in a pinochle tournament. Isn’t it time for Hurricanes Madison and Skylar? Where’s Latrice, or Category 4 Fredonté?
Lee once got a comment from a renter that read, “I was shocked by your outdoor shower.” “I was thinking, How surprising can it be?” he told me. “I mean, you’re at the beach, for God’s sake. Then I went out to wash up, and when I touched the handle for the hot water, I got thrown clear across the room.”
It was Christmas dinner, and it’s a slippery slope. One year you wear a down coat at the table, and the next you’re dressed in a sweat suit eating cold spaghetti out of a pan in front of the TV.
That aside, who doesn’t want to hear about a man who shoved a coat hanger up his ass?
When the waiter asked if we were ready for the check, my father said, “Are you ready to bend over and take it?”
One of our favorite places there is Dover Street Market, which sells both crazy Japanese clothing and taxidermy—the best of both worlds.
I’d seen a kiwi there a few months earlier. “It was the size of a chicken,” I said as we walked into Barneys, “mounted on a thin plank of wood with its head lowered just slightly and this beautiful, delicate beak about four inches long. I asked the price and learned it was the equivalent of ten thousand dollars. ‘It’s a hundred years old,’ the salesman told me, which I guess makes sense, but still.” “That’s when you should have snapped the beak off and asked, ‘How much is it now?’” Amy said.
Whichever way he intended those two faint words, I will take them and, in doing so, throw down this lance I’ve been hoisting for the past sixty years. For I am old myself now, and it is so very, very heavy.
“Those shoes look like you made them yourself. Are you a cobbler?”
for centuries
How many times have I knocked on a woman’s door after dark and had her answer wearing a sweatshirt that doesn’t seem to go with the rest of her outfit, or with her arms crossed over her chest? I thought that was sign language for “Couldn’t you have told me you were coming?” Now I see that it actually meant “If you think I’m putting my bra back on for this bullshit, you are so sorely mistaken.”
A Jewish fellow named Saul Epstein owns a nail company, very successful, and when he retires he hands it over to his son-in-law. Then he moves to Florida, and is there one day, reading the New York Times, when he comes upon a full-page ad. It’s a picture of Jesus hanging on the cross, and below him are the words THEY USED EPSTEIN NAILS. Furious, the old man reaches for the phone. “Are you out of your mind? That’s no way to sell our product!” The son-in-law promises to fix everything, and a week later, Epstein opens his Times to find another full-page ad. This one shows a cross standing empty
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What’s the worst thing you can hear while you’re blowing Willie Nelson? “I’m not really Willie Nelson.”
“So God tells Adam, ‘I’m going to make you a wife, a helpmate, the most beautiful woman who ever lived. She’ll be fantastic in bed, uncomplaining, and adventurous. The thing is, it’ll cost you.’ “‘How much?’ Adam asks. “‘An eye, an elbow, a collarbone, and your left ball.’ “Adam thinks for a moment, then asks, ‘What can I get for a rib?’”
And, OK, I’m pretty clumsy. I trip all the time, but never have I gotten back on my feet with a pepper grinder up my ass, not even a little bit. I’m pretty sure I could tumble down all the stairs in the Empire State Building—naked, with a greased-up rolling pin in each hand and a box of candles around my neck—and still end up in the lobby with an empty rectum.
“And it was still connected to Bluetooth,” the woman who showed it to me whispered.
I made a note to put it on my Million Dollar Idea list, just below a chain of airport barbershops called O’Hair. Is this why I’m not poor? I wondered. Because I’m always thinking?
Instead, I wondered why I couldn’t carry off a pants turban the way this guy could. It isn’t fair, I said to myself, handing him the bill.
“Aaaaaaaahhh!” He let out another cry, and passersby looked my way, their expressions reading, What’s that monster in a skirt trying to do to that poor homeless person? But it wasn’t a skirt. It was a pair of culottes!
By the time a nurse told me about a patient who had inserted an electric toothbrush inside himself, and another who’d managed a two-liter bottle of Diet Mtn Dew, I was so inured that I said only, “Wait a minute. Diet?”
“The internet said it was a flea market,”
The vendors in the countries we tend to go to are stocky women with scarves tied beneath their chins, and you don’t dare catch their eyes. Doing so means beaming as they hold up a shorted-out curling iron with dried nail polish on it, or a crocheted blanket the color of sorrow. Please don’t unfold it, Patsy and I think as the woman inevitably unfolds it, smiling to reveal three gold teeth in an otherwise empty mouth and saying, we can only imagine, “Look at how wretched my life is!”
Aside from some Chinese businessmen in our hotel, everyone I saw—everyone—was Caucasian. This is often the case in Eastern European countries no one wants to immigrate to. A few years back, in Romania, we were told about a Syrian man who arrived in Bucharest having walked eight hundred miles from Aleppo. When he learned that he was not in Austria, the refugee wept, put his blood-soaked shoes back on, and hit the road for Vienna.
“That’s called harvesting,” I said, sounding, I feared, a little too much like an English teacher. “Their organs were harvested.”
Now, when Patsy and I eventually visit, we’ll know to keep our eyes on our eyes as well.
Referring to a missing mirror on his passenger-side door, he said, “It fell down” rather than “It fell off.” No big deal. It was charming. I just didn’t see why my baby Romanian couldn’t be equally enchanting. “Girls are going to laugh at you when you talk,” he warned.
“Americans think that bullfighting is savage and backward, but if you could do it with firearms we’d probably be all over it,” I said. “Can you imagine? The bull would be released and someone with a sawed-off shotgun would blow its front legs off.”
I noticed that he said oosh-ul-lee rather than usually. Beach was bitch, as in “Live in this mansion and you could have your own private bitch!”
I wanted to say that our media tells us nothing about Serbs, or at least nothing that anyone pays attention to. Most Americans can’t identify Minnesota on a map, much less the former Yugoslavia.
Patsy’s biggest fear, and perhaps her most irrational one, is that someone is going to shoot her in the head, execution-style.
Many of her clients get upset when they learn that things in France aren’t exactly how they are in the United States, that you can’t buy Big Gulps, for instance, or get A.1. Sauce for your steak frites. These are the ones who get down on their knees and kiss the ground when they disembark from their plane home to America.
I see these people and wonder what my life would be like had I not been lucky enough to be born where I was
It sounds petty, but if at any time during the meal a dinner guest used the word surreal to describe our current situation, or the phrase hunkered down, I would make a mental note to disinvite them from any future get-togethers. I hated the clichés that came with the pandemic, hated hearing the new normal. Oh, and heroes. At first the word was used for health-care professionals. Then for essential workers. Then we were all heroes. “Give yourself a great big hand, and stay safe!”
It’s an odd spot to occupy—the ally. On some website that morning, I’d watched a video of two identical-looking blondes spray-painting I CAN’T BREATHE on the facade of a Starbucks in Los Angeles. “What are you doing?” a Black protester shouted. “That’s something I’m going to get blamed for. My people. Who asked for your help anyway?”
In this particular case I actually welcomed my mask, as it relieved some of the pressure of chanting, which is something I’ve never been comfortable with. It’s the same with prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance.
“Don’t you think you could come in the night and replace General Braxton Bragg’s head with that of, say, Whoopi Goldberg, and it would take months for anyone to notice?
“Joan is ninety now and has blood cancer.” “Ha ha!”
some of us with hats
One thing you never want is for your youngest sister to call for advice on anal sex, especially when she’s getting paid for it.
“Slim down to one-fifty and you finally get to have sex with a ninety-five-year-old man who is also your father!”
