Airwick Seafood Scented Candle. Hide yours. I'm coming over.
Randy and I just got home from Mexico. I’ll spare you the vicious, shuddering details and simply say that my four-hour car ride home was divided three ways:
1) eyes squeezed shut, trying to deduce exactly how many hours the human body can go without a vegetable and still maintain basic functions while attempting to approximate my specific “YOU ARE HERE” square on the mall map that is “ALIVE” and, consequently, how close my personal square might be to the proverbial “END” (second floor, in between Charlotte Russe and Gap Body);
2) eyes squeezed shut, earnestly discussing with Randy the benefits of a diet based solely on fresh-squeezed juice, noting with joy that we already own a brand new fifteen-thousand dollar juicer because I’m super good with cash like that, and also noting that every time my lips form the words “fresh squeezed juice” I can feel my ravaged innards rally slightly and quiver with fresh hope;
3) eyes squeezed shut, whimpering.
Suffice it to say, it was a rather long—and for me, rather dark—four hours.
Upon arriving home, I immediately stripped off my sandpaper four-day shorts and gave them strict instructions to jump into the washing machine and to wait for me. And as Randy began wolfing down half a brown banana, I emptied my bag. Whereupon I came to the following somewhat disheartening conclusions:
1) Gym shorts? Sneakers? Mp3 player complete with fancy traveling armband? YOU ARE NEVER EVER EVER EVER GOING TO GET UP EARLY AND GO FOR A RUN ON THE BEACH, ERIN. FUCKING EVER, OKAY? JESUS.
2) You know what’s sort of cute and fun and sentimental when you’re like seventeen and on a Mexican beach vacation? Bringing home your bottle caps! Isn’t that precious? Because each of those, what, eight? bottle caps has a specific nostalgic significance and maybe you can put them in a little glass votive candle holder so you can look at them wistfully and remember Bottle Cap #4: The One That Jon’s Cute Friend Adam From New Zealand Wrote His Initials On Right Before He Pressed It Into Your Hand Late That Night, Standing In The Murmuring Surf At Low Tide, With Nothing But The Stars And The Breeze Soft Like A Rose And His Giant Nineteen-Year-Old Kiwi Boner...
You know what’s less cute? Getting into the habit of pitching the bottle caps that you wrench off by the threes into your bag. Because after four days of pretty much nonstop wrenching, the immigration radar sensors are going to hone in on you like a scud missile six-pack and start speed dialing the Pentagon. When I opened my bag I realized that I finally had enough bottle caps to make that campy coffee table top... and enough left over to build a water filtration plant.
3) On Sunday afternoon Randy and I walked inside the condo only to be assuaged by the unmistakable reek of shellfish. Since we ourselves had been on a strict diet of God’s good graces, we knew that we were not responsible. And after about ten minutes of walking around, sniffing taps and opening drawers to no avail, we sort of forgot about it, hoping that the smell would magically abate on its own. Which it did in fact seem to do. And this was worrisome in and of itself to some degree; I grimly asked Randy whether he thought that the shellfish smell had magically drifted out? or whether maybe we had just become so used to the stench we didn’t realize that we were now snuggly nestled within it’s smelly folds. Being a man and thus not that interested in the first place, he assured me that the smell had disappeared.
But I just unpacked this bag, right, and as I did so in a room that I use primarily for cleaning things (and not, in comparison, for being completely ridiculous) I think I speak with some level of confidence and authority when I say that shrimp will cuddle up next to you and weave their shrimpy tentacles around you so tightly that suddenly you catch yourself wincing at a whiff of fresh air. I had to wash everything in that bag—even all the stuff I took and didn’t wear—just to snap my clothes out of it. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: never trust a prawn.
So now that I've unloaded my bag into the washer and I'm thoroughly disgusted by pretty much everything—not least of which being my impending doom since Randy just ate the only piece of food in the house that doesn’t come wrapped in cellophane or end in “—ce cream”—I grab the car keys and storm out to the driveway. I figure that a torso-sized In-N-Out burger has lettuce and tomato on it, and just to really prove to my body my serious dedication to keeping it out of a coma, I’ll have them throw some onion on there to really round out the vitamins and minerals. See, body? You big fucking whine bag? I hop in Randy’s truck because in his haste to not die of scurvy he parked it like a barge blocking the driveway and I head to In-N-Out.
And sitting in the drive-thru lane sort of half leaning against the door I catch sight of myself in the side-view mirror. And you know how sometimes when you’re expecting the worst but then you’re pleasantly surprised to find yourself not quite as repulsed as you had originally imagined that you would be? Yeah, imagine the opposite of that. I’m sitting there doing everything I can to not make eye contact with myself in any of the eleven thousand mirrors on this stupid truck of narcissism (there’s a mirror on the stereo? Seriously?) when the adorably fresh-faced burger girl comes to the window. I try to take my gigantorm paper tray of food from her sweet little hands without a) turning her to stone, or b) passing on my humbling and potentially incurable shellfish ailment when she suddenly pulls the food back and I almost fall out the window in pursuit.
“I love this song!” Seventeen-If-She’s-A-Day exclaims.
I listen. It’s Don McLean’s American Pie on a CD I made for Randy about a hundred years ago. I had tuned it out because the same song had been playing when Randy raged into the driveway like a prisoner of war tucking up to the buffet and it had been playing the whole time I had been sitting there because American Pie is arguably one of the longest songs in the history of long and that’s why it was so impressive when I sang it front to back that time at karaoke without the lyrics on the screen and standing on the table.
“What’s it called?” SiSaD asked sincerely. “It reminds me of when my mom used to take me to my grandparents’ cabin and I love it. I just can never figure out what song it is.”
I have to say that I was struck then. By the simplicity and sweetness of this little girl in a stupid hat working the take out window at a burger place. And I stopped trying to avoid my own reflection for a minute and I smiled and told her the name of the song.
“Here,” I said, pulling the CD out of the player. “You can have it. I think it’s song number nine.” Or something, I don’t know, I made up a number. She’ll find it, it’s the one that’s thirty-six minutes long. (“Hey! Lonesome Loser! This reminds me of that time BEFORE I WAS BORN.”)
She was infinitely appreciative. I think that if In-N-Out had like a platelet IV deal on their value menu she would have upgraded me free of charge. And now that I’m home and the laundry’s moving and the bathtub is filling up and it’s been more than five minutes since I’ve caught the scent of shrimp in my nostrils (which, hi, I think we’ve established means exactly dick), I feel pretty good, too. So I guess if there has to be a moral here—and if we want to avoid easy stereotypes and not make that moral about alcohol abuse, or having enough self-respect to take good care of your body, or maintaining personal dignity—I think the moral has to be about the uplifting power of giving. And about how you should park straight in the driveway like a human being if you have shit in your car that you’d like to keep.
