Happy-Go-Lucky

by David Sedaris

It’s night, and a cop stops a car a couple of priests are riding in. “I’m looking for two child molesters,” he tells them. The priests think for a moment. “We’ll do it!” they say.

Gretchen patted my hand. “Don’t listen to Hugh. He doesn’t know shit about being an ant.”

“You look like you swallowed a bomb and your face froze a fraction of a second after it went off,” Amy told me. What do people without sisters do? Turn to someone like my friend Scott. “You have summer teeth,” he once told me. I said, “Excuse me?” “Summer here, summer there,” he explained.

Then there were the contents of my own mouth, the teeth spaced like tombstones in a church graveyard.

“Can you give them to me to wear?” I asked. In the dumb-question department this is right up there with “Do you think mankind might one day live peacefully on the sun?”

“Now let me show you your ‘before’ pictures,” the dentist said. She pulled out her phone and I saw what looked to be the mouth of a hippo in attack mode. Summer teeth indeed. How had I chewed food? “And I was walking around like that?” I asked. She put her phone away. “Apparently.” My new teeth must have looked amazing when, a few minutes later, the receptionist presented me with a $14,000 bill for one day’s work and my mouth dropped open.

When told by a woman at a book signing that I had a beautiful smile, I seriously thought I might cry. Never did I expect to hear that from someone. It would have been like getting a compliment on my hair, which would happen only if the rest of the world suddenly went bald and I now had something they didn’t.

In response our father gasped for breath. “Well, he looks good,” Amy said, pulling a chair up to his bedside. Who is she comparing him to? I wondered. Google “old man dying,” and I’m pretty sure you’ll see exactly what was in front of us: an unconscious skeleton with just a little meat on it, moaning.

There was a Willow as well, and a Hickory. I guessed that was a thing now, naming yourself after a tree.

paths were blocked by his extendable leash, but no one except me — who had remained seated and thus was not actually inconvenienced — seemed to mind. “Oh my God!” my fellow guests cried, as if it were a baby panda they had stumbled upon. “How adorable are you?” One woman announced that she had two fur babies waiting for her at home. “It must kill you to be separated from them,” the whore who’d set the plate on the carpet said. “Oh, it does,” admitted the jism-soaked hag who had started the conversation. “But they’ll see Mommy soon enough.”