Your Hair Keeps Growing After You’re Dead.

When my father’s mother died, I was about four years old. She had been driving to work early one morning, I was told in my adolescence, and fell asleep at the wheel, drifting into the path of an oncoming eighteen-wheeler. At the funeral, I was allowed to kiss her dead cheek, which I remember finding strangely cool and solid, like plastic. She didn’t smell like anything. I don’t remember a sensation of loss, but I do remember thinking she was being buried in a giant watch-box, since when my parakeet had died, that’s what had served as its tiny coffin.

I didn’t develop any interesting psychiatric peccadilloes (that I am aware of) as a result of this event in my young life. I didn’t develop a sexy heroin addiction, for example, for which I could have gone to a recovery center and which, after a drag on a cigarette and a dramatic plume of smoke, I could have blamed on my grandmother’s death. “I started on smack because I couldn’t get over seeing her lying there, dead as a big fat doornail,” I could have said. “I got on the horse and chased the dragon, and so on and so forth, because of my terrible grief.” I would have squinted away tears and then perhaps looked poignantly out the nearest window, as if staring off into a too-distant horizon. I might have then written a gripping memoir about it that could have been adapted into a major motion picture with Kathy Bates as my poor dead grandma. Who would have played me? It seems tacky to speculate. Drew Barrymore, is who.

When I got a little older, I became preoccupied with the notion that my dead grandmother, now residing in heaven, could and did watch me in my earthly activities. I became worried about going to the bathroom, for fear of my grandma peering supernaturally at me while I did my body’s dirty business. This fear also arose when I would dig the Hustler magazines out from under my parent’s mattress and flip through the pages, staring with a mixture of disgust and curiosity at the bizarrely contorted female bodies. I had no idea that pubic hair didn’t naturally grow in an exclamation-point shape until puberty. The combination of shame at the thought of my deceased grandmother gazing at me from above and panic at the notion of being caught made this entire activity one fraught with nauseous tension. But I still did it, because I was grimly fascinated.

The night my father’s mother died, he came in to my room in the middle of the night, sat down at the end of my bed, and sobbed in the dark. I pretended to be asleep, because even at four, I knew something was very wrong with him. I have never seen him cry before or since. I never told him that I was awake that night. I doubt he even remembers it.

After a few years of paranoid delusions regarding my grandma watching me while I ate secretly in my room or whispered “fuck you” at the back of my teacher’s head, my mother, who hated my father’s family, angrily and spitefully informed me that my grandma hadn’t actually been driving to work, she’d been driving to catch her cheating husband, my grandfather, in the act with another woman. And that she was probably drunk at the time. After that, I stopped whispering.

Untitled Work in Progress

Cleaning blood stains out of a light-colored carpet may seem like a daunting task, but with the right tools and a lot of elbow grease, it is possible to make it seem as though the blood was never there. First, get some cold water and an absorbent cotton towel. If the blood forms a trail from the couch where your mother sleeps to the front door, start at the first, and largest stain – the one likely formed when she stood up to call an ambulance while blood pooled around her feet. Start by soaking this area with cold water, and wait a minute or two for it to soak in.

The phone at my sister Molly’s house in Texas rang only a few times before she picked it up. It was two or three in the morning – I don’t exactly remember which – and her voice sounded rough and older than it does when she’s not woken from a dead sleep. “Mom’s in the ER,” I said. I remember feeling like I couldn’t catch my breath all the way, so everything I said was in phrases, fragments of terrible news, like ripped up newspaper with just a few words on each strip. “She had another heart attack.” She didn’t break down – we don’t do that – but her voice went up an octave. Maybe she was squeezing her sleeping husband’s hand. Maybe she hadn’t even opened her eyes yet as a told her the details in layers. “They told me they ‘lost her’ in the ambulance. I got here maybe ten minutes after the ambulance. They brought her back. In the ambulance.” I could see her from where I stood, surrounded by volunteer EMTs – people she worked with in our tiny rural town, where she was the deputy city clerk. A few of the EMTs were fellow city employees, but all of them were well-known to her. Their faces read panic and confusion – old ladies breaking their hips and teenagers smearing themselves across the highway with stomachs full of liquor are apparently not enough to inure one from being afraid that you might make a mistake and kill your friend. I briefly worried that she would be embarrassed that her underpants were showing. I thought of going back in there and pulling her nightgown back down. I didn’t.

After you have allowed the area to soak for a while, take your cotton towel, lay it upon the stain, and beat your fists on it, over and over. Do not rub; that will work the blood in deeper to the fibers, and then there is no way at all to pretend it wasn’t there. Blot the stain forcefully – don’t be afraid to stand up and use your heels. If need be, reapply more cold water and start again.

She was being taken to a hospital in a town forty miles away after they had stabilized her in our local ER – a “bandaid hospital,” some people in town call it. As I sat in the ER waiting to follow the ambulance there, my grandma walked in. Her eyes were wet but she wasn’t crying. She had her purse clutched tightly in her hands. “Hi honey,” she whispered to me as she came in, as though we were in a church. Or at a wake. She only calls me “honey” when she’s very upset or when I’m doing something like getting married or having children. She sat down next to me and asked me questions about what had happened in that same hushed tone. Out of her white old lady purse she produced a crumpled Kleenex and with it, savagely wiped her eyes and nose, almost as though she was angry with her tears and snot for being so rude and invasive. Later I wondered what secret tears she had mopped away with that same wadded up tissue, and when, and where.

Continue soaking and blotting each stain as you come to it, making sure to remove as much of the moisture from the carpet as you possibly can. This can be a very time-consuming process, so it helps if the house is totally empty of people other than yourself. The silence will help you focus on your job, which is getting the carpet clean. That’s the most important thing. Stay focused.

At the larger hospital, she was hooked up to a variety of cardiac monitors. We stayed only long enough to make sure she was okay and to talk to the doctor. He said a lot of things. She’d had a heart attack, obviously. She’d flatlined in the first ambulance, they’d shocked her heart to get the rhythm back. The trip to this hospital had been uneventful. Her face was the color of pencil lead incompletely erased away, as though you hadn’t pressed hard enough on the paper. They were going to do an angiogram, see what damage had been done. My dad was still on the road, somewhere in Georgia, probably, delivering a load of cookies or peanuts or lawn chairs or whatever – “call me right away after you talk to the doctor.” I had to wait until we were away from the sensitive monitoring equipment. We waited as they took care of the business of admitting her, completing their assessments. When they let us in to see her, she was groggy. She joked about wanting a cigarette. My grandma took her Kleenex out again.

The key to successfully removing blood stains is to do it as quickly as possible. Letting it sit for a long time makes the stain much deeper and harder to remove. The faster you can get to the stain, the better the results. Don’t be tempted to use hot water; it will only aid in setting the stain.

A few weeks later, she came home. They gave her home care instructions. They gave her a “stop-smoking” binder. After her first heart attack, ten years earlier, she’d stopped smoking for awhile and then surreptitiously started again. I caught her more than once before she finally came clean. I remember feeling furious and helpless in my fury, because there was nothing I could do or say to make her stop. She had gotten “better” and wanted to pretend as though it had never happened, I think. Who wants to dwell on the fact that they’ve had a heart attack at forty-three? Blot it out of your mind.
This time, the angiogram knocked cholesterol from her artery loose and sent it floating gently through her bloodstream, until it stopped and formed what is known as an atheroembolism in her kidney. Shortly thereafter, her kidney began to fail, and the embolism choked off the blood supply to the tissue near it, causing a large wound on her flank that opened from the inside out. When it surfaced and broke open, she woke from sleeping on the couch to find herself drenched in blood. Another ambulance ride, another trip to a larger hospital, another grave discussion with a nameless doctor. She didn’t lose her kidney, but she had a severe wound and required hospitalization and treatment for a long time. I cleaned the blood off the carpet and decided to keep a Kleenex in my purse.

In the best of cases, most of the blood stain will disappear; however, you should be prepared to have the carpet removed and discarded if you simply cannot fully eradicate the damaged areas. After all, carpet is easily replaceable. Another alternative is to simply live with the faded outline of the large areas where your mother’s blood once pooled around her feet.

Untitled Work in Progress

At the very head of the line, there is a canopy which provides shade from the blast furnace heat of this late July afternoon. Under the canopy, it is perhaps twenty degrees cooler than anywhere else, which means that under the canopy it’s just Regular Hot instead of Unbelievably Hot. About ten people can stand in a straight line under the canopy at a time. We are at the back of the line. Ahead of us are approximately seventy-five other people, all of them seemingly as close to the border of heat stroke as we are – except the lucky few at the very front, enjoying the luxuriously decadent five square feet of shaded concrete. There is a sound ahead of us, and the line lurches forward a few feet – not enough to get us out of this scorching heat, but enough to fill us with grim hope.

The others in this line are morose-looking teenagers like me; or women and men with chubby, beet-faced children whose shorts (invariably either neon pink or yellow) are wadded firmly between their legs, forming that funny inverted shorts-v that some people get if they’re not paying attention. Most of the boys have buzz cuts. The girls mostly have pony tails, some perched at an odd angle on the parietal side of their skulls. Their sweaty mitts lay like stillborn puppies in their parents’ hands, or else clenched around an electric blue Sno-Cone. Next to me stands my sister. We’ve been in line for forty-five minutes. At first we were excited and talked of the fun time ahead. We stopped speaking about fifteen minutes ago owing to the exhaustion we both are experiencing. I am fifteen and she is ten, and we have been here for what seems like the whole of our young lives. We are being slow-roasted. Our brains are bubbling. We are waiting to get on the ValleyFair Raging Rapids ride.

The fun of the Raging Rapids ride is essentially predicated on the idea that you will enjoy being violently whiplashed from side to side while having water sprayed on you from a variety of high-pressure hoses concealed behind fake rocks. This simulates “white water rapids.” As a fifteen year old, I took this to be a reasonable claim. Normally, I wouldn’t have placed myself in the position to have my hair – meticulously Aqua Netted that morning before we left our motel – thoroughly drenched and thus utterly ruined, but the insane heat of the day has changed things. After I got in line, my sister Molly joined me, and here we have been, shuffling slowly forward, for all this time.

This is the kind of place that is 90% concrete and 10% grassy area which you’re not allowed to walk on, and which in fact is roped off from the public; the occasional tree is planted smack in the middle of nowhere. Somewhere near one of these bizarrely placed trees is our mother, aunt Colleen, and grandmother, probably drinking Cokes and bitching about who-can-guess. With them is also our youngest sister Suzie. Suzie is seven, and one of those kids with a strangely rich vocabulary and full of the kind of moxie that some little girls have – the kind where, when they storm into a room, you expect to hear musical cues a la some old Ann-Margaret movie. Like bum-bum-BA-DA! BAP! Suzie is not fond of the word “no” or of being told she’s too young to do things.

The head of the line comes into view. Finally, hope springs up inside me again; I can even see the “you must be THIS TALL” – fifty-four inches – “to ride RAGING RAPIDS” sign. I look at my sister; she’s about five feet tall, even at age ten. We smile feebly to each other, our usual sister-versus-sister death match temporarily suspended; sweaty-faced, miserable but determined. Then I see Suzie.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see her marching up to where we stand in line, hands balled in little fists, ginger bobbed hair bouncing indignantly with each step. I can hear the zerrp-zerrp-zerrp of her plastic jelly shoes as they stomp across the hot concrete toward us. She comes to an entirely officious-looking halt next to us, and slams her fists on to her hips.

“You guys,” she says. She is panting. Her cheeks are bright red, whether from the heat or from the righteous indignation. “Mom says you have to let me go on the ride, too.”

In the distance, I can see my mother, sitting and smoking on a bench under a lone, preposterously placed tree, watching. She has that face on, the one that is intended to warn me in advance that she is in no mood. I look at Suzie, standing before me like a furious gnome. She’s way too short for this ride, maybe four feet tall, total. The sign clearly states fifty-four inches and up. If there is one thing I love at this age, it is getting to rebuke my sisters thanks to rules that my mother can’t change. I look at the sign, then at my mother. I think she reads it on my face, because her eyes narrow a little and she takes a long drag on her cigarette.

“You can’t,” I tell Suzie, packing as much triumph in my voice as I can reasonably fit. “You’re too little.” Her little face crinkles like Christmas paper. She wails, loudly. She runs back to our mother, jelly shoes zerrp-zerrping out the song of her sorrow. My mother, seeing this, looks at me angrily and mouths what is going on? I point to the sign and hold my hand horizontally next to me, first at about my eye level, then at my ribcage. She’s too short. I shrug. Maybe it was the shrug that got to her.

I turn back to Molly. We agree that Suzie is way too short for the Raging Rapids ride; moreover, she is known for demanding to participate in things like this, then getting scared halfway through and having to be rescued. Plus we always have to take her along, and she tells on us if we swear. Later this year, Suzie will find the carefully hidden cigarettes in my bedroom and will gleefully present them to my mother, who will dramatically destroy them and will ground me for weeks. And will light a cigarette while lecturing me.

We’ve made it to the blessed canopy. We’re almost the next ones to get on the ride, which is sort of like a giant tire with seats. Our excitement has reignited, and we’re grinning, anticipating the fun that surely awaits us. The guy working at the head of the line is visibly bored and hot and tired, his red ValleyFair FUN! t-shirt sticking wetly to his back as he waits for the ride to return.

That’s when I see my mother climb over the chain with Suzie in tow and begin storming toward us across the forbidden grass.

Quit Smoking in Nine Steps

The day you began smoking cigarettes was the day you became one of society’s least favorite people. Everyone, bar almost none, hates smokers, including other smokers. Here’s why:

• · you stink
• · you blithely inject cancer into other people’s bodies when they innocently pass through your cloud of filth
• · you leave your disgusting used butts on the ground, your coffee-shaded lip-prints still visible
• · you think you look very cool and very tough; and let’s face it, you do, but it’s the bad kind of cool and tough
• · you stink. I cannot emphasize this point enough.

Because of this tremendous moral failure on your part, there is a worldwide campaign to wipe your grotesque habit clean from society’s innocent, bewildered face, where you’ve deposited it like a gob of spit phatooied out the window of a slowly-moving car. Governments all over the globe have passed legislation forbidding you from smoking in almost every square inch of any space that can be considered public; those locales that haven’t yet done so will do so soon, rest assured. In light of this cascading wave of cultural hatred against you, you might have said to yourself, somewhere in the dark, lying alone in your wretched smoker’s bed: “maybe I should quit smoking or something.” This moment of epiphany was probably followed by six hours of sleep and five hours of agony as you tried to shake the rabid, screeching rhesus off your back, before finally surrendering, exhausted; a Misty 100 (the sort of humiliating cigarette you swore you would never resort to), begged off a coworker trembling between your yellowed fingers. I know this like I know my own name, or am reasonably sure of my own name, if my mother is to be trusted, and how? Because I was a smoker too, once. If you want to quit – really, really want to quit – I will tell you how.

Step 1: Tell everyone around you that you are going to quit smoking, and that you’re pretty sure it’s going to be very easy, even though it is hard for almost everyone else, because you’ve got a lot of personal integrity and you’ve been through some serious stuff in life.

This will make your immediate circle of friends and acquaintances actively root for you to fail, just to shut your big fat mouth, thus ensuring that Fate will reward you with the opposite, and thus ironic, outcome. See also: “I never play the lottery so I bet I will win if I buy a ticket because that would be really ironic because it seems like ironic stuff happens all the time, like when a guy who’s never even heard of Poison calls a radio station to request a song and ends up being caller nine and wins tickets to see Poison at the fair. Like that.”

Step 2: Throw away your cigarettes, ashtrays, lighters, etc; buy four boxes of Cocoa Puffs.

Your new hobby is eating constantly. Additionally, make sure to have no fewer than six boxes of any snack food with the term “L’il” on the label. This should last you approximately two days.

Step 3: Purchase clothing four to six sizes larger than you currently wear.

See step two.

Step 4: For the first three days, drink a bottle of Nyquil* every time you find yourself conscious.

This step mitigates the withdrawal symptoms and minimizes the number of people whose faces end up regretfully slapped when they make the mistake of looking in your direction while the nicotine craving is upon you. Hint: the longer you stay semi-comatose, the shorter the withdrawal period. Ask a friend to check on you daily and turn you as necessary.

*you may substitute bottles of vodka; however side-effects include death. Ask your doctor if vodka is right for you.

Step 5: Develop a new signal that tells the world what kind of cool, devil-may-care character you are.

Now that you no longer have a cigarette – the international sign of rebelliousness and rugged individualism – dangling from your lips, you must perfect a new affectation that conveys the same message. Men: experiment with headbands, a la Rambo or brash young tennis sensation John McEnroe. Women: a comb which looks like a butterfly knife until you pull it coolly through your hair gets the message across nicely.

Step 6: After approximately a week, you will begin coughing up a large amount of grayish matter.

Do not be alarmed; this substance is merely dead lung tissue that you have carelessly destroyed and will never get back. Nothing to worry about!

Step 7: Cover the mirrors in your home so that you may avoid gazing upon your withered visage.

Your mirror image seen in the absence of a gray-white haze of smoke might be alarming to you at first. It’s better to take in your wizened, old-before-its-time face in brief, unexpected glances – as reflected in storefront windows, for example – than full-on at once. Once you feel you’re ready, remove the sack cloth (or another dramatic-sounding fabric of your choice) from the bathroom mirror and gaze upon the ravages of smoking: lines around your mouth and eyes deep as the furrows left behind a ploughshare. Happily, tears are an excellent moisturizer.

Step 8: Prepare yourself, emotionally, for the moment when your senses of taste and smell come back.

It may shock you to realize that Red Bull tastes like melted Twizzlers mixed with dead battery soup and that the smell of Axe body spray is somewhere between “vomit” and “athlete’s foot spray” on the continuum of scents. One very crucial moment you will experience is when you realize how bad cigarette smoke actually smells – a detail which, in your previous filthy smoker’s life, utterly escaped you. The first time you encounter a person who has been outside smoking in the cold who then comes inside and gets into an elevator with you will be a moment of sudden, rude awakening. In this step you will come to learn that there is some sort of chemical reaction that takes place when smoke gets cold which causes the stink molecules in it to expand and take on a bewilderingly offensive stench which causes the eyes of every non-smoker in the vicinity to tear up in response. Your new, nonsmoking senses are finally free to communicate the repulsive tastes and smells you never realized were all around you. Enjoy!

Step 9: Now that you’ve successfully quit smoking, the final and most important step is to become as unrelentingly smug as possible.

Smugness is the greatest – and perhaps only – reward for giving up smoking. Ex-smoker smugness is an extremely pleasurable experience, and you should be sure to exercise it whenever possible. A few examples:

Scenario 1:

Coworker/Smoker: Shit, cigarettes are $5.75 a pack now? Christ!

You: Wow, really? They were $5.50 a pack when I quit. I don’t know how you smokers can afford to buy cigarettes these days. Oh, did I mention that I saved up all the money I would have spent on smokes for a month and bought an iPhone?

Scenario 2:

Casual Acquaintance/Smoker: Man, I think I have that flu that’s been going around. I’ve been coughing and wheezing for, like, a week.

You: Oh, wow…you smoke, right? Hmm…it’s probably not the flu. It’s probably the early stages of emphysema. That’s why I quit: I didn’t want to end up dragging an oxygen tank behind me for the rest of my days. I guess quality of life is just more important to some folks than others. Oh well!

This, truly, is the secret that Big Tobacco doesn’t want you to know: that I-Quit-Smoking-Smugness is every bit as satisfying as that first cigarette in the morning. Drink it in; you’ve earned it.

If you follow these basic steps, you will quit smoking. You will also be a fat, miserable, relentlessly smug asshole that spends his days drunkenly crying in front of a mirror, but that is an infinitesimally small price to pay for your health. Even though all those bags of Doritos and cartons of French onion dip you crammed, raccoon-style, into your mouth whilst trying to stave off the urge to smoke will have shellacked your arteries with greasy white heart-attacking cholesterol, your new smoke-free lifestyle will allow you to extend your life days and perhaps even months longer than it would have lasted otherwise. Providing you aren’t genetically predisposed to breast cancer or don’t have a job that deals with chemicals of any sort and assuming of course you never sleep on a commercially-purchased mattress, quietly off-gassing while you slumber.

Good job! You’ve slightly improved your projected life span!

The Christmas Party

It is cold. Snowing. In a word, miserable. The sky is flat pewter, the bowl of an unpolished spoon. I back the beat-up minivan into a space strategic to the front door of the Senior Center, which we’ve rented for the sum of $35; the guy on the radio mentions something about four to six inches of snowfall tonight, which is really pretty uncool of him to say, all things considered. I ask my passengers to help me lug the food inside, while I carry twenty pounds of meats and cheeses and crackers and try to fish the key out of my pocket at the same time. Sherry R pushes past me once I have the door unlocked, almost knocking me over, and then looks over her shoulder and yells “It’s the CHRISTMAS PARTY! Smile!”

Somewhere on my left comes a blur of youthful enthusiasm and Axe body spray as Evan B sprints past me to dig around in the Walmart bag of sparkly Christmas stuff; he immediately wants to put up the decorations we bought, but I haven’t even really seen the inside of this place yet, so I don’t know where they should go. He’s not interested in my hesitation, so he starts scotch-taping garland around the perimeter of the main room, then hanging round plastic ornaments on it every foot or so. Luckily, he’s got a much better eye for symmetry than I do, so it looks nice. Glenn R, though, finds fault in everything Evan does, so he follows behind him at a determined waddle, offering constant criticism in the form of insults and scowls which squish up his wrinkled face even further, until he looks like a piece of beige chewing gum with eyebrows and a crew cut. The garland is crooked, the color of the ornaments is all wrong (red and green is all wrong? Really, Glenn?), the tape is bound to give way under the weight of the decorations and cause massive garland failure, and so on. Evan, who is not that many years removed from believing in Santa, is too full of Christmas-party excitement and ignores Glenn, as usual. Glenn decides to sit in the corner and glower. “Can you come help me get this food ready, Glenn?” I call out to him. He gives me the finger. “Well put,” I say, and start trying to assemble one metric ton of pasta salad.

Randall M wants to know who’s coming. “Everyone, hopefully,” I answer, reading the back of the Suddenly Salad box. The directions don’t say anything about making five boxes at once! Goddamn incomplete directions!

“Like who, though?” he asks, picking at his rugby top and pacing in circles. His jeans are easily three sizes too big for him and seem in imminent danger of falling down, but evidently this is considered cool among guys his age.

Three tablespoons oil times five-“What? Like, I don’t know, all of the Lantry Street people, all of the Seventh Avenue folks, all of the Sugar Streeters – you know, everybody was invited. I don’t know who will show up, but hopefully, you know…most of the people we invited? All of them, I hope. That’s what we want, right?”

“If Brenda comes, I am not dancing with her. I am NOT.”

“Okay, you don’t have to.”

“And I am not sitting with old ladies.”

“Well, that’s…kind of unnecessary, but okay, fine, don’t.”

“And I don’t want to hug anyone.”

“Fine, Randall. Your choice.”

“And I don’t like Warren.”

“Well what does that have to do with-you know what? Fine. Don’t like Warren then. Randall, I have to do this right now, and-“

“And I don’t want to wear a Christmas bow on my head.”

“Well who – damn it, I spilled the – who said you had to?”

“And I don’t want to dance with Brenda.”

“Randall, I got that part, can you just – will hand me the- this much pasta won’t fit in this pan? Are you kidding me?”

“And I don’t want any of that pasta salad.”

An hour later, I have some of the pasta salad ready (that which did not meet an untimely end on the Senior Center kitchen floor), most of the meat and cheese platter finished, and the kitchen’s window counter has been becrock-potted with no less than five warm food options – BBQ beef, “sloppy joe” meat, chili, cheese dip, and I think the last one is full of meatballs. Sherry has been hovering, opening lids (fogging up her thick glasses when the steam escapes), rearranging crackers, fingering the sliced cheese - until I ask if she’s washed her hands. She slinks away. Glenn is still engaged in recreational glaring. Gwen C has smoked probably eighteen cigarettes since we’ve been here, so I ask her if she wants to set up the boom box near the “dance floor” we’ve made by pushing some tables against the wall. She nods and smiles and walks away in that sort of tranquil shuffle that is one of the side effects of her psychiatric medication.

Nina M shuffled in last when we brought in the stuff so that she wouldn’t have to help, and has been drifting in the shadows at the other end of the room the whole time. I know I have to try and encourage her to participate, but I doubt she will. “Nina? You want to help Gwen with the music?”

Silence.

“You want to give her a hand?”

Silence.

“Nina?”

“NO!”

“Okay. Thanks anyway, I guess.” Nina utterly detests any kind of party, get-together, gathering, activity, shin-dig, communal experience, et cetera, but Nina’s mother insists she has to go. Nina is thirty-eight, but her mother is her legal guardian, so…her mother wins. But I’m not going to nag her any further; I know how little she enjoys being out of her room, away from her TV and crossword puzzle books. She never actually writes in them, but she turns the pages over and over again. I think it’s comforting. Or maybe she has yet to find one she likes. One day, a few months ago, I had to tell Nina that she couldn’t continue hoarding boxes and boxes of old, unused crossword books – my boss had informed me that they were a fire hazard that could get us in trouble with the state agency in charge of inspecting group homes. Nina’s reaction was nothing short of ridiculous – screaming, throwing things, at one point actually kicking – but in the end, we threw away four boxes of dusty old newsprint puzzle books she hadn’t actually looked at in easily three or more years. She still seems to hate me for that.

Gwen has everything plugged in and ready to go and puts in a CD which I can only imagine must be titled “Hits of the 90s,” because “Ice Ice Baby” comes rolling in its 5.0 out of the speakers, which prompts Even and Randall to start trying to out-dance each other. Sherry has helped me finish the punch, and we are ready for our guests. Glenn continues to give us the frowning of a lifetime, Nina is still being the Phantom of the Christmas Party, Gwen is outside smoking again, and Randall and Evan have progressed to some kind of slam-dance competition.

First, the Seventh Avenue people pile in. Seventh Avenue - each residential site is referred to by its street name in order to maintain “normalcy;” we are encouraged not to say “the facility” or “the home” - is a group home, like our site, Twelfth Street; the other sites are four-plex semi-independent living apartment buildings. The Seventh Ave staff shuffle in behind them, bored, looking to be fed; Sandy, Gail, and I line up and start serving people. Wayne from Seventh Ave takes three cookies instead of two and I can see Russell in the back of the room looking at him with disgust. I catch his eye and give him the “not now, please” face. He rolls his eyes. Mike G, who is extremely tall and extremely loud, jostles to the front of the line. “Is that pasta salad made with nuts in it?”

“No, Mike. It isn’t.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure.”

“Positive?”

“Yes, positive. No nuts ever touched this pasta salad. This pasta salad is absolutely not made with nuts.”

“Well do you have any that is?”

Danielle, one of the Seventh Ave staff, tells Mike to knock it off and keep moving. This is a completely bullshit thing to say to him – he’s not a child – so I lean over and address her. “He’s fine, Danielle. Really.” She has piggy little eyes, filthy clothes, and a perpetual scowl. She just pinches up her face and looks away.

No one here is a child. Sherry and Gwen are in their forties, Glenn is fifty something, Nina almost forty – Randall and Evan are young, only nineteen, but not children by any means. Everyone here works, most of them full-time, and have been doing so for years and years. The same demographic applies to the other group homes, apartment complexes, to everyone who works at the workshop sorting pop cans or bundling paper together. Adults. And you don’t tell adults to knock it off and keep moving. Danielle is now on my list of people to glare at later.

Some of the other invitees begin to pour in, so the serving line is moving at a fast and furious pace. The Sugar Street gang rolls in, and who is first into the room but Brenda C, who makes a beeline for the boom box and yanks the CD out, replacing it with some sort of all slow dance music collection or something. Randall has disappeared; like a bubble popping on a blade of grass, he’s just gone. Wendy corners Paul N from Seventh Ave instead, who is perfectly happy to oblige.

Finally, everyone is either eating or dancing or giving me the finger (thanks for that, Glenn), so I hang back in the kitchen and start rinsing out some of the pans we used to make them easier to wash later. A few of the staff members have gathered in here to bitch about work. Danielle looks over at me.

“Hey, what’s Randall’s problem?”

“With what?” I ask. Maybe she could help me with some of this?

“I mean why’s he here. Why is he a consumer?” “Consumer” is the term currently en vogue to describe the people who receive services through the company I work for; in the past, it’s been “clients,” “residents,” “patients,” and as one looks further back into the dark closet of history, a lot of other words that you would no longer expect to say in polite company.

“Why?”

“He looks normal, so why is he here?”

There it is. He “looks normal.” In other words, unlike Evan, or Nina, or Glenn, Randall doesn’t “look” disabled. Neither do Sherry or Gwen, but their speech patterns and mannerisms are usually the giveaway. Randall doesn’t sound “special,” either. I know why Randall’s here, but I’m not about to tell her.

“I mean, is he here for psych issues, or what?”

“Why do you ask? What does it matter?” I can feel my face get hot. What does it matter what someone’s “problem” is? When is the last time someone asked her which condition she has that makes her unable to put on a clean pair of pants for work?

Danielle has caught the hostility in my tone, which, to be fair, I’m laying on pretty thick.

“Whatever. I just wondered what his diagnosis is.” She walks out in a bit of a huff, and I hear her
exit through the front door to have a cigarette, which she will no doubt leave smoldering on the sidewalk next to Gwen’s. I tell myself, angrily, that I will have to remember to make sure that all the butts out there are picked up, so we don’t lose the deposit we put on this place to have our party here.

So then I see Randall slip back into the building. I call out to him to come in here, please. “How about you help me with cleaning up the kitchen?” He steps in and looks around. “Wendy’s not in here, right?”

“No, Wendy’s not in here. What is your thing about Brenda?”

He picks up a towel and starts wiping off the counters, pausing to run a hand through his stick-straight black hair. “She just freaks me out. She follows me. She’s always staring at me. It’s weird! It’s like she loves me.” Randall pretends to shiver violently. Brenda does tend to be a bit obsessive with the people she has a crush on, but I wonder if there’s more to it. I wonder if it has to do with who Randall feels is more like him – more “normal.” He gets bored with the counters and flits back out the door.

The music gets turned up a little, and Glenn releases a string of profanities, many of them totally original , insisting that it be turned back down. Since it’s not totally cranked up to a ridiculous degree, and since Glenn is the only one complaining, I decide not to step in, but to be honest, I’m getting a headache from the music, too. In combination with the constant stream of consumers wandering into the kitchen looking for more food or hoping to get someone else in trouble (for being rude, for not allowing someone to sit at their table, for trying to steal someone’s boyfriend, and so on), my Christmas spirit has dwindled pretty severely.

By the time we’ve collectively plowed through the food and exhausted every possible slow-dance song and group-dance possibility (Bunny Hop, Electric Slide, Macarena), I am sick of this party. I am sick of Randall’s bitching about everything, I’m sick of Glenn’s attitude, I’m even sick of Gwen shuffling around like she’s in some kind of grinning coma. No one said thank you as they came through the food line; people just handed me their plates and looked at me expectantly. No one seems to appreciate the work the staff has to do to make this happen for them. Well, correction: the work I did to make this happen – the other staff members (“residential instructors” to be precise) seem to be preoccupied with their cell phones. I could be at home with my kids; I could get a different job, but instead I’m washing dishes without any help for a group of people who seem not to have noticed that I did anything at all.

Gwen strolls in, dreamily, smelling of smoke and with that odd ever-present grin. “You want some help?” she asks, tucking a strand of her graying red hair behind her ear.

“You know, actually, I would like some help. Thanks for asking.” She grabs a towel and stands next to me, ready to dry.

“We used to do this at the Catholic school gym,” she says. Her medication slurs her voice a little, but I’ve grown accustomed to it.

“Do what? The Christmas party?”

“Yeah, we did it at the Catholic school gym for about fifteen years. Then about five years ago, they raised the price. So now we do it wherever the staff decides.”

My hands work over a pan in the hot soapy water. Twenty years ago? I was a kid in school twenty years ago, and Gwen was going to Christmas parties like this one, with some other staff, someone whose name is probably long forgotten. Gwen was in a group home twenty years ago, dependent on someone else to take her grocery shopping or give her a ride to buy shoes or to throw her their version of a Christmas party. I, too, was dependent on someone else for all those things twenty years ago…but then I grew up. Gail is a grown woman who has to wait for someone else to tell her it’s okay to write a check for a DVD or lunch at McDonald’s, lest she make it out to the wrong person or write the wrong amount in the little rectangle. I’m free to walk out of this job, or move somewhere new, or just be alone. Gwen, as a matter of law, isn’t – her legal guardians have the right to choose where she lives, not Gail. She’s a dependent adult. She’s dependent on me, someone who has no ties to her at all.

“You did a good job with the party,” she offers. “We never usually have pasta salad.” I smile and thank her, but I can’t feel good about it now. I’m ashamed at myself for having felt as though I needed to be thanked for putting on this party. Why would these people thank me? For doing something I’m paid to do? For serving them food that their social security disability money pays for? For caring about them – as though that’s a benevolent thing to do?

We finish the clean-up. Our guests leave. I pick up the cigarette butts outside, noting the staggering number of Kools – Gwen’s brand. Loading everything back into the van, Evan and Glenn bicker over who gets shotgun, Nina immediately climbs into the back seat and folds her arms, Sherry helps put the stuff back in van while chattering about Brenda and Paul, who have apparently decided to start dating after their many (somewhat inappropriate) slow-dances tonight. Randall sidles up next to me and asks where the party will be next year. I tell him that I don’t know. The truth is, I don’t know because I won’t be here – I’m going back to school, and I will be quitting this job next summer. I don’t tell him that part. It seems rude. Finally I lock up the building, clean the snow off the windshield, and get behind the wheel of the van, ready to drive everyone home. The man on the radio mentions the revised forecast – three to five inches instead of four to six. Gwen’s voice drifts up from the back seat.

“It snows every year on Christmas party day.”

“I bet it does,” I respond, and put the van into gear.

Auction Day

People in winter coats and boots stream in to a large warehouse, some tugging semi-resistant children behind them, murmuring to each other. They are filing in from the gravel parking lot, which is full of old pick-up trucks and minivans, as well as sport utility vehicles with small cargo trailers attached. Once inside, everyone stomps the snow off and strains to see past the doorway and into the building. As the space is only heated enough to keep the pipes from bursting, coats are kept on. No one pushes or shoves, but the sense of anticipation is palpable; it is generally considered poor form to dick around in line, so having your gloves off and writing-hand ready is the proper etiquette.

There is a middle-aged woman at the door seated at a card table, who asks each person to write their name and phone number on a sheet of lined paper. After they do, she hands them a piece of cardstock with a number on it. Her fingernails are long and fake and fuchsia, and her hair is a shade of blonde which is, frankly, a bit of an insult to real blondes everywhere; her couture is best described as late-70s Urban Cowboy. She calls everyone “hon,” as in “fill this out hon,” “thank you hon,” and so on. She smiles at me as I walk in, and in doing so, makes me feel like a jerk for having just harshly assessed her Lee Press-Ons. This feeling is quickly extinguished, because as I walk into the warehouse proper, I am inundated with the sight of a sea of rectangular folding tables covered with stuff. This is Peck’s Auction House; this is auction day.

Auction day at Peck’s is a wonderful opportunity to see what happens when a consumerist culture vomits all over itself. The least-useful junk in the entire universe is for sale here, assembled from the picked-over remains of the earthly possessions of someone’s deceased relatives. Do you need a full set of the vinyl recordings of Jim Neighbors, only slightly warped? Do you need a suspiciously stained, threadbare recliner, rust in color? Do you need a box full of only moderately-used Avon samples? The answer is no, you don't need this stuff. Nevertheless, one Sunday a month you can find for auction these weird cast-offs from dead grandpas and crusty old aunts whose houses always smelled like Ben Gay and Sanka.

First is the period before the actual auction begins, when you can peruse the junk. The tables are set up in rows, the contents sort of grouped by category. Behold the boxes upon boxes of dented metal loaf pans, slightly rusted colanders, chipped stoneware dishes. Frying pans which were cheap 25 years ago are here for the bidding next to kitchen gadgetry from the 70s which is, inexplicably, offered in its original packaging (it takes serious foresight to save the box your electric can opener came in); plastic tumblers, plastic bowls, plastic containers, plastic anything; the sheer number of ice-cube trays is staggering.

I look over these things with a keen eye; I don’t want a full set of New Kids on the Block glass tumblers, do I? The woman on the other side of table from me is picking through the junk with a similarly deft touch; we’re moving at the same pace, each touching or turning over an item and then, almost as if working in tandem, putting it back down and picking up whatever the other one just had. I am almost ready to wander away when I notice, out of the corner of my eye, a cake pan in the shape of R2D2. My eyes dart to my mom-jeans doppelganger across the table; has she seen it too? Does she want it? I begin to imagine a back story for this woman: she is some kind of shabbily-disguised eBay superstar millionaire, here to cull all the cool weird crap and sell it to annoying hipsters for a 400% markup. I glide, cat-like, to the end of the table, trying to act natural – I don’t want her to think I’ve seen something she might be interested in, so I pretend to look at a set of yellow Tupperware measuring cups with great interest. She is still poring over a box of Corningware baking dishes (and I don’t blame her, Corningware is very durable, people), and I sense that it is time to make my move. The cake pan, which is stamped “1977” on the back, is so utterly, wonderfully, pointlessly perfect (it reminds me so sharply of my girlhood that I can almost smell my mother’s cigarette smoke and Gee Your Hair Smells Terrific shampoo) that when I pick it up, I actually smile at it, child-like and wondering, before casting a final, furtive glance at my opponent. She has yet to even look in my direction. Nevertheless, in my imagination, she and I now grudgingly respect each other as equals in the game of auction finds; but still, to the victor go the spoils. I walk away, dreamily, clutching the cake pan. Five minutes later, when I remember that this is an auction and not a garage sale, I nonchalantly return to that table and replace the cake pan. Don’t worry, though, I did actually win the pan later on; I was the only bidder, paid $2 for it, baked one cake in it, then sold it on eBay to an annoying hipster for $35, which is the approximate cash value of my childhood memories.

The auction part is when Ron Peck, owner of Peck’s Auction House, strides into the crowd to begin the bidding. He walks around the tables with an assistant, who carries the speaker part of a battery powered microphone/speaker unit. Looking at Ron Peck is like seeing a mosquito in amber; he is an absolute time capsule of upper Midwestern culture from about 30 years ago. His face is like a dried apricot, if a dried apricot were to grow a head of hair and then proceed to pomade the fuck out of it. He is wearing a similarly Western-themed get-up to the woman at the door; I can’t remember if that’s his wife or daughter or if pearlized buttons and belt buckles are just really, really popular amongst the professional auction set. He’s very scrawny and talks entirely through his nose. People stop talking and form a small group in front of him.

Peck informs us that the stuff on the tables will go first, then the furniture which lines the walls. He stands about three feet away from us, the crowd of people who move silently with him up and down the rows in an orderly fashion. You, were you to go to a Peck auction, might ask yourself: why does he need a microphone? We’re all right here in front of him! My answer to you is: don’t ask questions. Just go with it.

A few things about Ron Peck are immediately apparent to the casual observer: first, that any piece of electronics produced after 1984 is utterly unknown to him, and second, that he is unbelievably sexist. These two characteristics are promptly exhibited in the same sentence: “now here we have some kind of a gadget – looks like something you might use in the kitchen to shape hamburger patties, ladies – let’s start the bidding at five dollars.” It’s a plastic CD carrying case. I shoot him the darkest look I can muster, but I don’t think he can actually see me through his giant tinted gold-framed eyeglasses anyway.

Here’s what it sounds like when he auctions stuff off: “Heyyyyyyyyyyyyy blubbll blblblblblb lblblbllblb FOURTEEN blblblblblbllblblblb fourteen fifty blblblblblblblblblblblblblb Fifteen? Fifteen? SOLD, fourteen fifty.” The guy with him, the speaker-carrier, yells “HUP!” and points to people when they hold up their little numbered card to bid. I don’t actually want anything except the cake pan, but I stay in the little crowd anyway, because it is a fascinating study of human behavior, and also because the rest of the warehouse is overrun with boogery-nosed little kids and rheumy-eyed old people. Frankly, I only really like my own kids, and everyone else’s kids seem loud and dirty and annoying. I’m generally neutral on old people, unless they try to hand me a wadded-up Kleenex to throw away.

So I stay in the cluster, careful not to move a muscle when the bidding is going on, lest I accidentally buy a foot bath or a fake black lacquer end table. The crowd stares, shovel-faced, at Peck, some jaws slack, others held firmly closed, cheap Walmart t-shirts under their cheap Walmart coats. I say this with affection, as a shovel-faced Walmart aficionado myself. We schlep from item to item, either waiting for what we want or, like me, just watching the whole thing happen.

Every once in a while, if you wait long enough, it happens: a bidding war. In this case, it’s over a snow-blower, which is not surprising, since snow removal comprises roughly 35% of the average Iowan’s life in the winter. First, it’s three men, then two. They don’t look at each other, but the crowd looks back and forth between them, the anticipation building. Who will crack first? Who will win this auction-house Battle of Verdun? The guy in the green John Deere cap nods curtly at each turn; the guy in the red International Harvester cap seems less sure, rocking on his heels, his arms tightly folded. They trade bids back and forth, the tension gripping all of us together in a vice, until finally International Harvester shakes his head no. The crowd exhales, and International Harvester has somehow become less of a man in their sight; he slinks to the back of the building. Or, he got hungry and went to get a maidrite from the lunch counter. I prefer my interpretation.

Eventually, all the stuff is auctioned off, or not; some of it is simply too crappy for even the most fervent crap-lover to want. People walk out, hauling their junky finds, wives and husbands and brothers-in-law strapping twin beds and floral couches to truck beds or trailers. Little old ladies totter out with boxes full of nearly worthless stuff that only recently belonged to other little old ladies; stuff that will likely end up being auctioned off again in a few short years.

I get back into my van with my R2D2 cake pan and drive home. Peck’s auction house is like a museum of a way of life that doesn’t really exist anymore; the unique, slightly tacky, slightly wonderful rural Iowa I knew as a child. Among all the old stuff and the people who, a generation ago, would have been farmers, but who now work at ethanol plants or large-scale hog lots; people who eat those maidrites from the lunch counter in the building, and drink fountain Pepsi with no ice out of a paper cup – somewhere in there is an echo of a thing that I can’t exactly put my finger on. Even Peck himself, with his polyester outfits, shellacked pompadour and goofy voice, represents a different time, a distant era.

I know why I go to these auctions, even though there’s never really anything up for bidding that I actually want: to visit those old threadbare, dead grandpa recliners and hideous cardboard “art” prints of boats or sad elephant clowns or whatever; to breathe in the musty-sweet smell, and kick the tires of memory.