Shameless Plug.

Christmas really sucks cock sometimes.

I think what really did me in was Christmas 2004. It’s what made me realize that the holidays are a time of disappointment. I fully blame this on my ex-boyfriend, Mark, who – upon assessing my personality and my love of books, decor, interesting nicknacks, music, flowers, clocks, picture frames, anything with a Jane Austen quote, funky magnets, gloves, coffee mugs, vases, sock monkies - decided what I really needed in my life was a plastic purse light. What is a purse light, you may ask? It’s a glorified flashlight in the shape of an egg that swings from a plastic clip that you attach in your pocketbook. It was bulky and unusable and totally shiteous and when I tried to use it there was a 75% chance it wouldn’t even work, just blink on and off until it eventually blew out altogether. I have a vague recollection of smashing it repeatedly against the sidewalk with my foot, but my memory is hazy – I tried to block out whatever bits were left of the purse light fiasco.

So ever since then I have tried to find an avenue that would leave me a little more fulfilled. Present giving was fun; I even liked decorating a Christmas tree. Something was still missing, however, and I never knew quite what it was.

Until this year.

Ricky and I were spending time together, being appauled as usual by the Christmas offerings of obese snowmen and gingerbread men who appear to be high on mescaline, when we started discussing some ornaments we’d really like to see on our tree. For starters, nothing Christmas-themed. And as we knocked around ideas, we realized that 1.) we used to work together in a pottery shop that offered stoneware clay, 2.) we both rolled, cut, fired and painted said clay for store displays, 3.) there was a place down the street called “Wine and Cake” hobbies that sold all manner of cookie cutters we could use, 4.) we could fashion our own ornaments and even sell them if we were so inclined, and 5.) we could do this while drinking rummed-up eggnog in our sweatpants, which, I don’t know about you, but remains my favorite state of doing anything.

So Ricky and I got to work.

What we came up with was this: a Godfather horse head, a legion of slutty mermaids (one with an anchor tattoo), shirt-torsos of lumberjacks, hippie men, and truck stop dudes, ugly trout, and of course, the creme de le creme: THE VAGINA DENTATA (I took the liberty of providing the link to Wikipedia that may explain this to anyone who never took a medieval literature class to explain what that is exactly: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vagina_dentata).

They are all listed on a page over at Blogger.com:  http://dirtybirdandsaltyfish.blogspot.com - I’m a big fan of WordPress for straight-up writin’, son, but it’s annoying as shit to put pictures on this thing, which is why I only add them when I’ve turned 25 or just been to Gingernuts. Blogger.com is a little kinder for photo media.

If you actually want to purchase an ornament, you can check out Etsy:  http://www.etsy.com/shop/stasche. Even if you’re not into ornaments, they have a ton of cool handmade items from sellers across the country, and a couple international artists, too. Very balling website.

Thus concludes my shameless plug. But if I didn’t show you my penchant for tasteless Christmas ornaments, I would be doing both of us a grave disservice.

Feeling Testie.

My parents raised me and my brother to be thoughtful, compassionate, rational people, which is why I am glad they can’t sense that I’m at a truck stop at 10 p.m. playing quarters and being ogled by truckers who are trying to assess whether I’ll give them a blowjob for $20 and a case of garlic-herb tenderloin they’re hauling in the back of a Gwaltney truck. 

My brother Taylor, on the other hand, is at home outlining his aerospace engineering notes for his midterm the following week.

Taylor has always been the obvious choice for the exemplary offspring of my parents, as he’s been in far less trouble: never has Taylor flooded his car on the streets of Norfolk, making my father throw on his Eddie Bauer sweatshirt and old loafers and race down 464 to find his child shivering in a fire station, nor has Taylor had to “slip in the back” of a family member’s funeral because he was an hour late; Taylor has never snuck out of the house to meet suitors who threw pebbles at his window, nor has he consumed so much vodka that he was too drunk to keep the toilet lid from falling on his head, causing a near-drown in stale toilet bowl water and Aristocrat vomit; and as far as I know, Taylor has never slept with someone at a Halloween party because he liked that they came dressed as John Oates.

Taylor, for as long as I can remember, has lived a structured and regimented life. His room is unsettlingly middle-aged for an eighteen-year-old: it’s done up in blues and brushed silvers and furnished with old records that my father kept in the garage which are now arranged in a diamond-shaped grid on his largest wall, and a vintage French racing print hangs above his bed. He has a book shelf filled with gadgets and manuals and pictures from family trips to Venice and New Orleans. Even his food habits are unfussy. For lunch, he packs a piece of bologna between two slices of Mary Jane white bread, no mayonnaise, no mustard, everything slipped into an unmarked brown bag that made a curt rustle when slipped into his backpack. From 6 to 8 p.m. he outlines his chemistry notes. At 9 p.m., his girlfriend since his Freshman year of high school calls, just like she has since they were fourteen, and they talk for an hour about movies and computers and classes and probably things that seem convoluted at eighteen that will straighten themselves out years later. He got a job at ODU, where he has a full engineering scholarship, transcribing software; he recently converted a textbook entirely into Braille for a blind student, completing a months-long transliteration in a matter of days. The boy is brilliant.

So when my mother calls me and says, “Dad just took Taylor to the ER,” naturally, I panic a little. Because if Taylor is in the ER, it’s not because he was drag racing or spitting bits of cigar onto known gang members; it’s because something horribly out of his control has happened.

 “He’s okay,” says Mom before I have time to convulse. “He’s alright. His – it’s his balls.”

I stop.

“His balls?” I say.

“I came home from church and he was lying on the couch writhing in pain with an icepack on his crotch. I knew he felt really horrible because he didn’t even care if I saw his thing-dinger. That’s not usually something he shows his mother.”

“Well, what did you do?”

“I Googled ‘testicle pain’ and it said that he might have something called a testicular torsion. Basically his balls got twisted. And if you don’t correct it within a certain amount of time, he could become infertile. He’s alright. I’m sure we caught it in time. I just want to get him to a doctor.”

“I’ll be down there in a few,” I tell her, and start to throw on clothes, whatever I can find, whatever will get me out the door and to the car and in the waiting room of Chesapeake Regional Medical Center.

While rushing around, I put on a pair of tan Totes socks, which, oddly, they issued me at the hospital at my last surgery – a thought that makes me stop in my tracks. Taylor and I, vastly different for the whole of our lives together as siblings, do have one thing in common: a genetic predisposition, something reprehensibly engraved in our chromosomal make-up that, at the age of eighteen, we both have to have our genitals operated upon.

It goes a little something like this.

As a high school senior, I suspected that my hymen was not only fully intact, but that my hymen was iron-clad; I managed to ascertain that this was most definitely the case after trying to complete the seemingly impossible task of having sex with my high school boyfriend, John, who wanted very badly to lose his virginity after the senior banquet, and was met with extreme disappointment when his seventeen-year-old penis, stiff as a plank, would not slide comfortably inside my vagina. Slathered in spermicidal lubricant, I winced in anguish while John tried to work himself inside, lovingly whispering various encouraging phrases such as, “Why isn’t this working?!” and “Do you think your Dad is going to come home?” Finally, John gave up, defeated by my USS Merrimack vagina; it was a humiliating loss for the young man who wanted so desperately to be the first member of the Hickory High School drumline to have gone all the way with a woman, and an awkward state of affairs for me, as well: I had an unusable vagina. All the equipment was there; it was just sealed up, a sort of genital trust fund that I wouldn’t be able to tap into until I was eighteen, when I finally got the nerve to tell my mother that nothing – absolutely nothing – would fit inside my twat.

Of course I said it much more gently. “Mom, I can’t get a tampon in,” I tell her.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, I can’t get tampon in.”

“Are you putting it in the right hole?”

“Uh…yeah. I mean, I’m pretty sure…how many holes are there down there?”

“Well, start from your asshole and then move forward; it’s the first one you come to.”

I disappear into the bathroom, and following my mother’s strict directions (this was 2002 and long before GPS systems were standard), was still unable to manipulate a Playtex into my womanly cavern. I come back out and announce, “No dice.”

My mother looks up at me from her Oprah magazine and frowns. “Really? Well. I guess we’ll have to get you to a gynecologist. It’s time you saw one anyway.”

My gyno, aptly named Dr. Hammer, examines my vacuum-sealed genitals and tells me that yes, indeed, my hymen is abnormally rigid, and that they will have to perform a hymenectomy before further complications have the chance to arise. This is devastating news for my father, who realizes all but too soon the kindhearted gift the Lord had bestowed upon him as a parent. “A solid hymen. It’s every father’s dream. Like a built-in chastity belt.” He sighs heavily and looks back down at the crossword as he tells me this. “I don’t see why we can’t your first husband to handle it for you, but your mama insists we take care of it now. Damn insurance is too good sometimes.”

The day of the surgery comes and my mother drives me to the hospital, where I will be having an outpatient procedure to slice my hymen in three separate areas and then sear the carvings shut, thus allowing mobility while keeping everything intact; making my hymen, essentially, a doggie door. I lay on an operating table in a haze of anesthesia, waking up to find myself newly stripped of an intact vaginal mucous membrane.

When I am wheeled back to a hospital room, my mother is waiting with the pair of tan Totes, which, kneeling, she slips on my feet. “I can see everything from down here!” she exclaims, cocking her head into my crotch. “Looks like they shaved you.”

I think about this as I drive to the hospital. How strange that two seemingly healthy young adults would both have such bizarre issues with their most intimate of body parts; then again, I suppose that if there’s one thing we aren’t in the Watkins family, it’s shy about our bodies and their various functions. It seems somewhat fair that if it has to happen to someone, it should be to a family that is comfortable talking about sexual organs than say, a group of siblings at a Mormon compound in Eldorado. But still, I am annoyed. There are many men who deserve to have their testicles twisted – repeatedly. Every hour on the hour, even. There are some men who deserve to have their testicles revoked altogether. But not my brother. Not the guy who makes me mini pizzas when I come to visit for the afternoon, or who records our rendition of “Bohemian Rhapsody” that we sing in the car on our way up to Richmond every Thanksgiving. Guys like Taylor – guys who aren’t dicks to their girlfriends, who still say “Yes, ma’am” and “Yes, sir” to their parents even when they’re far past the age they could get in trouble for not saying it, who stay up late outlining chemistry notes for their midterm – don’t deserve the pain of twisted nuts. They deserve tiny medals to wear in their tweed jackets. They deserve an open bar. They deserve full harems.

I walk into the hospital and hear my mother. She’s upstairs in the surgery waiting room, but her voice is echoing through the main lobby. “…just took him in and that’s all we know…” It sounds like she’s on the phone with someone, probably my aunt. My father is leaning over the balcony. He spots me and beams, then waves me up. “Take the elevator!” he calls. “We’re to the left.” He doesn’t look worried, but that’s typical of my father in these situations. My brother and I have always said that my father has an amazing amount of luck, starting from his time in Vietnam where he managed to dodge being the only one not blown to bits while on patrol, to meeting my mother and convincing her to run away with him, to having two children whose only genital trouble came from improper functioning and did not involve shitting out his illegitimate grandbabies from one-nighters with people from New Jersey. He wiggles his eyebrows at me as I pass under him. He’s hoping his luck will hold.

My parents and I sit in the waiting room. We’re the only ones there. My mother is trying to talk quietly on the phone to her brother, but her voice carries like a fog horn in an otherwise stagnant hallway. “Well, it’s called a testicular torsion,” she says, shaking one crossed leg over the other. “And it means that his testicles are wrapped around when they shouldn’t be.” After extensive fact-checking on Google, my mother likely knows more about the condition than Dr. Woo, who, my father informs me, is performing emergency surgery on my baby brother’s sack as we speak.

“It was funny,” my father tells me while we sit, “they were wheeling Taylor into a ward where they had more room, and the doctor told me it was the ward where the ‘psychiatric’ patients were kept. And I told him that was appropriate, being that my son was a nut case.” My father has always been one to diffuse a situation with puns. It’s a slightly unbearable but welcomed comfort.

Mom is now off the phone. We are all silent, thumbing through books that we’ve brought, and I wonder if my parents are secretly afraid that my brother is not going to be able to have children, meaning that the burden of grandchildren birthing is going to weigh heavily on my shoulders. There is a silent agreement between the four of us that Taylor’s children will likely be Nobel Laureates and mine will patent something like a fart machine.

More than that though, is that Taylor and I have always functioned brilliantly as the yin and the yang: the cool head and the excitable ball of nerves; the logistics and the fantasist; politeness and crudeness. So sitting in the waiting room, I am feeling a little lost, because my personified antonym, my baby brother, may be in trouble, and I don’t like it. I want him to have comfort foremost, but I want for him more than anything to have options, be it to have children or to travel the world or to be perfectly content in a room of blues and silvers for the rest of his days, because if anyone has earned the right to a life they most want, it is Taylor Watkins.

Dr. Woo comes to the waiting room and shakes my father’s hand. “He’s fine,” the doctor says, and takes a seat across from my mother. “Surgery went well. He’s resting now.” He pauses and leans toward my father, as though this part is meant for the men in the room, “His testicles were actually twisted around three times.”

“How did it happen?” my mother asks, and I send up a silent prayer that the doctor does not answer, “OVER-MASTURBATORY STRESS,” or “BLOWJOB TRAUMA,” because I truly don’t know how much more my mother could take knowing that both of her children are sexual depraved, but the doctor instead answers, “It could really happen at any time or any place – nothing causes it. Basically his connector that is supposed to stop it from happening was too narrow so that did him in. It could have been just the way he turned. There’s no rhyme or reason.”

“But you caught it in time?” my mother asks.

“Yep,” says Dr. Woo. “He’ll be just fine.”

I had brought a book for Taylor to read in case he had to stay overnight, which he did. Male doctors are pretty watchful when a dude’s nads are at stake, probably a clause in the Hippocratic Oath. Taylor is out like a light and I have to be at work early in the morning, so Dad offers to take the book to Taylor for me when he comes to. He hands me a pen. “You should inscribe it.” This is a tradition in our family when books are given.

I scrawl in the front cover: Dearest Taylor, I would never be so insensitive as to make light of a serious situation such as a testicular torsion, but I do happen to be inscribing this with a Uni-Ball pen. Funny how fate works out.

Taylor informs me two days later that my comments are humorous but unappreciated.

When I finally see my brother in person, I take care that the first thing I say to him be in the spirit of empathy and consideration.

 “Please can I write about your nutsack?” I ask him. “Please say yes, please.”

“Of course,” my brother sighs. “Once you’ve had a dozen different doctors handle your bits in a period of only a few hours, you tend to feel alot less shameful about it.”

The worst part, Taylor claims, is having to pee but not being relaxed enough in his nether-regions to do so. “I sat for an hour-and-a-half trying to get something out,” Taylor tells me, “and finally I put on ‘The Daily Show’ and let Jon Stewart work his magic. I was laughing and pissing within minutes.” Taylor is contemplating writing an e-mail to Mr. Stewart thanking him for his assistance.

I’m driving home and thinking about my brother. Taylor is my confidant; he’s known about secret boyfriends, drunken humiliations, and my brief addiction to Xanax, all of which he absorbs without scathing judgment. “Maybe you should rethink that,” is a favorite phrase of his. Usually these conversations take place in the guest room of my parents’ house where I stay when I sleep over five times a year: once at Christmas, once to take my parents to the airport for their annual vacation, and three times reserved for nights that I become expressively hysterical over men or money or sometimes both, and flee to the consolation of my family’s shelter.

Those are the nights that Taylor will come sit by my beside in a room my mother painted sage, which is a soft gray in the glow of the tableside lamp, and tell me not to worry so much. “You’ll be alright,” he says, barely above a whisper, and a cynical part of me questions how a man so young could assure me of that, but a larger part of me, the part that is happy to be sleeping with my parents’ room directly below and Gus the cat curled at my feet and my brother leaning back on his arms in a blue sweatshirt, believes him, because not only is he brilliant, but he is strikingly honest.

So when he says, “I love you, La,” he says, and turns out the light, I know he means it. He isn’t showy about his affection, nor is it misplaced. It’s simple and solid and it’s there. And it makes me love him more than anything else he does.

Taylor shuts the door. I hear his footsteps creak to his bedroom, and when  the house finally falls quiet, I send a silent thank you to whomever it was that decided we would be siblings, because I know how lucky I have it, and if I didn’t - I would be completely nuts.

Fool in the Rain.

The first murmurings of the Nor’easter came on a shadowy Wednesday morning, when, upon waking, I heard for the first time in many Ghent mornings, no birds; however, as it was 5 a.m., my first thought was less, “How very peculiar to hear none of the swallows whistling their tunes in the willowy treetops this November morn!” and more along the lines of, “Motherfucker, it is so fucking early. FUCK.” So I head to the bathroom for my morning extrication of urine and to poke my eyes with a mascara wand so that I could at least feign a state of consciousness for my part-time work at the bageldashery, then drive to Yorgo’s contemplating why I have chosen a job to supplement to my income that includes being awake at a time where I used to go to sleep.

Then a hot policeman comes in that morning and I remember exactly why I chose it.

“Supposed to be a storm coming,” Officer Blue Eyes tells me.

“Oh?” I say, handing him his coffee and squeezing my breasts together simultaneously.

“Nor’easter, they’re saying,” he says. He brushes my hand as he takes the paper cup from me. “So you be careful out there. Aren’t you by Stockley Gardens?”

“I am,” I say.

“Well, watch the flooding,” he says. “They say it’s going to be worse than Isabel.”

During Hurricane Isabel, I was trapped with my parents and my brother without electricity for three straight days, and the only thing we had to do entertain ourselves with at night was play instruments around  a crude fire we had fashioned out of five Christmas-themed Yankee candles; since the piano was too big to drag into the room, I had a harmonica, my brother had a mouth harp, and my mother was blowing into a jug; so there we were, your typical suburban middle-class family playing Ozark instruments with the living room smelling like a sickening, diabetes-rearing mix of Gingerbread Dream, Christmas Cookie, Home for the Holidays, Christmas Tree, and Festival of Lights (my mother, a lifelong liberal, bought the Jewish candle in an attempt to be multi-cultural). Deep into the night our neighbors likely heard the brassy hum of harmonica, though at least the harmonica had a little soul to it, as well as volume modulations; my brother’s jaw harp had one decibel level, a discordant BOING! BOING! BOING! BOING! My mother’s jug-playing was worse. Unable to muster the abdominal breaths it takes to make a drinking jug hum, my mother just vocalized, “HOOT! HOOT! HOOT! HOOT!” over my brother’s BOING! BOING! BOING! and my own amateurish harmonica stylings. We sounded like a camp of tone-deaf cowboys.

My father was so depressed by the whole scene that he retired to the bedroom at 8 p.m. “One hurricane and we’re the goddamn Yokums,” he said, shutting the bedroom door behind him.

“It couldn’t be worse than Isabel,” I tell Officer Blue Eyes, who has been waiting patiently for his Everything bagel during my ‘Nam-like flashback.

“Just be careful,” says Officer Blue Eyes.

When I go into the newsroom that afternoon, reporters are bracing themselves for the big weather story. The editors rush back and forth in front of the Obituary Desk, which is on the main drag of the newsroom, which means that not only do I get the gossip from people who think no one is listening as they’re walking by on the phone (“The doctor said to apply it directly to my scrotum every day for six to eight weeks.”) but I also get hit with the journalistic mood as soon it strikes.

“Traffic reports, school closures, road conditions,” one of the editors says. “Make sure we have people on it.”

When I get back to my apartment that night, I flip on the news. “Brace yourselves!” the weatherman says. I listen to him babble on about cold fronts and April to November and something about flooding, but I forgot my dinner at work that night and I’m making cous cous and barbeque chicken, and as I have one chicken breast left, it is something in which I must devote my full brain power to, lest I burn it and have to Multi-Grain Cheerios for the third consecutive dinner that week. The weatherman carries on, business as usual, unconcerned that I’m not paying more attention.

In bed, I can hear the beating of soft water against the window pane, and I think of Kathy’s Song and the voice of the weatherman, and they are all combining into a drowsy ode, I hear the drizzle of the rain, a macro-scale storm along the East Coast, like a memory it falls, it’s a low pressure area, soft and warm, continuing, thriving on converging air masses, tapping on my roof and walls and I am fast asleep.

I wake up and it is pouring. The walkway to my apartment that once resembled a Venetian pathway now resembles a canal and leaves litter the ground like a sopping Oriental rug. I switch on the news again and an anchorman is standing knee-deep in water in a residential area, presumably dead cars parked along the curb s behind them. “This may look like a river, but’s not!” says the anchorman. “It’s a motherfucking STREET!” He doesn’t say the “motherfucking” part, but by the astonishment in his voice you can tell it’s implied.

I decide to move my car to higher ground so it does not flood, because even if I had the money to add on another car payment, I do not have the energy to deal with Jeremy, the hair-greased laden guy who sold me my Nissan, ever again. “This car has subwoofers,” he had told me on the car lot, brushing my arm with the sleeve of his poly-fiber aqua shirt.

“What the hell is that?” I had asked.

“They’re in the trunk,” he said, wiggling his eyebrows at me. “I won’t even charge you extra for them.”

I open my closet and get my pink paisley goulashes out, something I bought three or four years ago because I was convinced I couldn’t live without their bright whimsy, and now I am grateful for my tendency to impulse buy rainwear. I strap them on along with a pair of water-resistant pants and a few layers under a sweatshirt. My feet have become accustomed to high heels so when I begin to walk in my rainboots my brain doesn’t quite know what to tell my legs what to do. “Alright,” my brain channels. “Let’s try to walk! Left leg, move out at a forty-degree angle to the side, then come awkwardly back in! Nice. Right leg, you try. Good job, guys. Now do that for two miles.”

I start my car and drive it to the EVMS parking garage, then begin the trek to The Virginian-Pilot that would have made Jacques Cousteu shit his scuba suit.

The first half-mile wasn’t so bad; it was rather euphoric, actually, because the weather was fascinating. Trees shook like tuning forks, the wind gathered leaves and dust and crashed them into the once ivory sidewalk, and when I caught sight of the Hague in the distance, it was swollen and blackened, its belly boiled with raindrops. Then I reached the end of Olney Road, and while I had been contemplating getting a coffee from the 7-11 on the corner, I realized this task would be near impossible as the entire avenue had transformed into the river Styx.

Orange barrels clung to the ground, water jetties swirling around them, and cars sat lifeless on the road, reduced to stationary scraps, irregular boulders of metal and plastic. The traffic light I usually sat at on my way to work blinked yellow over and over, an urban lighthouse urging people to stay off the street, not that anyone would be foolish enough to be on the street in weather like this.

I cut through Fairfax Avenue and down towards the Chrysler Museum. A BWM in the distance reaches a pool of water that has formulated around the area, and thinking better of it, turns around. It reminds me of a BMW-driver I used to date. “The insurance is impossible,” he told me once. “Every time I pay my bill I feel like I’m being bent over and fucked in the ass.” As I watch the cherry-red taillights of the BMW make their way down the street, I wonder if he has the same sentiments.

I walk past the Chrysler and my once pink boots are covered with mud and bits of mulch pieces from the saturated grounds. A man in knee-high waders is making his way through a lake of rainwater in front of me. I realize that he is wading through the only pathway to The Pilot. For such a sobering moment it seems anomalous that I should want a shot of scotch before I swim through it.

There’s nothing left to do but cross it, so I take a step into the makeshift pond on Boush Street; it soaks my pantleg up to my mid-calf and my pants stick to my leg like hot leather. “Water-resistant my ass,” I say aloud. My stride becomes slower in the drag of the water, which is now up to my thighs, and by the time I’m in the middle of the street the bottom of my sweatshirt is saturated with wetness. I feel like news footage.

“Keep calm and carry on!” I hear my mother say, though if my mother had really been there, I’m sure she would have probably opted to say, “Laura, get your drenched ass out of the water and go home for God’s sake!”

But this is when my journalistic commitment kicks in, something that becomes acquired if you work at a paper long enough, and I find myself saying, “I have to get to the newsroom!” As I wade through two blocks of waist-high water, I imagine people yelling for me to turn around, turn back before it’s too late! But I just call back to them, “The paper has to get out!” And they beg me to stop putting myself through the flood, go home, let someone else fight this battle, but I’m so committed to reporting area deaths that I just call back, “I have no choice! We have to get out the paper! The public has the right to know the news!” Minor delusions of grandeur are quite constructive for helping one ignore the fact that their vagina is being submerged with stagnant municipal floodwater. 

When I reach the unflooded sidewalk adjacent to Lake Boush, my pants resemble leggings and when I touch my face, my fingers are laced with runoff mascara. I pass a glass door from one of the buildings and my hair is curled into a black tuft on top of my head, giving me an Edward Scissorhands kind of look. I pass two guys from WTKR, who smile at me politely, and if it had been other day, I would have been properly mortified to have anyone see me in such shambles, but all I want to do is get to where there is heat and no water.

I walk into The Pilot, and there are only a few souls that have been able to make it to work, one of whom is my editor. “Jesus!” she says when she sees me. “What happened to your face?”

“Huh?” I say, and look into a compact mirror I keep at my desk. Streams of black mascara residue have leaked down my once unsoiled countenance.

“You might want to fix that,” she says gently. “And I brought some extra pants in case I was stranded here. Why don’t you wear them?”

I spend the rest of the day wearing my boss’s pants. I also take my goulashes off and walk around in my socks for the rest of the evening. It is a very classy, professional look. Luckily everyone else looks about like me, with the exception of the business reporter, who always looks like he waltzed out of a Ralph Lauren ad, though I can’t imagine how he got here so goddamned dry. He walks by in a tweed blazer and pressed khakis and I narrow my eyes at him, envious of the flying hovercraft I suspect he owns. 

That night, my editor drives me home in her husband’s truck. The dead cars are becoming even more prevalent, tombstone markers in the flooded streets of what was once a sunny Ghent.

When I return home, my block is dark. My roommate Bridget is sitting with a candle lit in the middle of the living room. “Please tell me you’re having a séance,” I plead.

“Power’s out,” she sighs. “I’ve been trying to do schoolwork in the dark for an hour.” Bridget is a nuclear med technician, which means she is the type who studies even in the dark, rather than, say, play an imaginary jug.

She gives me a candle and I make my way to my room. It’s 9 p.m. and there’s nothing to do but brush my teeth in the dark and go to sleep.

I listen to the rain as drift off. It’s solid but appears to be tapering off. Maybe we’ll get power tomorrow, I think. Maybe the rains will hold off. Maybe the worst is over. Then I think, That rain is so loud. Which leads me to think, It sounds like it’s in my room it’s so loud. I pause and listen. It’s coming from my window. I walk towards the noise cataleptic and as intently as Lady Macbeth, the window my blood-dripping dagger, and realize that my window is, like her dagger, literally dripping. Pouring, actually. Pouring onto my great-grandmother’s hope chest and the piles of books I have lined atop it, which I immediately snatch into my arms. Sedaris, O’Connor, Ames – even Ford Maddox Ford since I was feeling extra benevolent – all flung from what could have been a watery grave onto the dry floor across the room, where they land with a sad thud. Nothing could break a reader’s heart more than hearing part of their beloved book collection land heartlessly on the ground, but it was a situation that called for action rather than sentimentality.

“FUCK!” I yell, and run to the linen closet, where I grab a pile of towels. Bridget stirs from her reading and joins me in my room, and we discover the source of the waterfall has come from part of the window molding, which has cracked in half.

We move my great-grandmother’s hope chest and Bridget, the calmer of the two of us, formulates a plan. “Let’s try to tape up the leak,” she says, and disappears into the hallway. Bridget brings back a roll of painting tape from the closet. “We didn’t have any duct tape,” she says, “but we could try this.” Bridget, in an amazing acrobatic feat, shimmies up my window and tries to tape the crack; the water is coming out with an amazing strength, however, and soaks through the packing tape before it even has a chance to adhere.

We lay bathroom trashcans beneath the runoff, and the water spills into the plastic pails with a dreadful, irregular drumming. I’m…fucking…up…your…evening, it says with each drop.

The rains subside slightly and the dripping stops; we are left with three trashcans balanced against my windowsill and sopping towels lining the floor. Later, when my landlord comes to assess the damage, he claims he could not deduce which window I had reported damaged. “It was the one framed with mildewed trashcans,” I tell him.

“Oh,” he tells me. “I was wondering what that smell was.”

Ricky offers me a place at her house for the next few days, where I could at least shower and fall asleep to something other than the sound of Chinese water torture. Ricky also owns a cairn terrier named Mo (short for Meauxtier Beautier) who, to wake me up each morning, would jump on my vagina and proceed to roll down my torso until I gave her a minimum 14-minute belly rub, which, if I wanted to keep my labia intact, I did. Ricky’s brother Gordon made me blueberry pancakes in the morning, however, so I kept my complaints to myself, even if I did eat my breakfast with a bruised vulva.

When I wasn’t at Ricky’s, I would drive by my apartment every so often, slowly, like a crazed ex-lover, to see if the electricity was back on. Yet it came to be Sunday afternoon, and the lights were still off. Sparing Ricky and Gordon another glimpse of me in a bathrobe, I decide to shower at the gym. Usually I’m a touch wary about showering in public – I like the familiarity of my apartment bathroom, where I at least know who has been using my shower, and I can be fairly certain that if someone has chosen to urinate in my bathtub, I at least know the person in which whose pee I am stepping. Plus I hate lugging all my stuff into the gym shower. It makes me feel like a pack mule.

But desperate times call for desperate measures, and so I find myself in the gym shower with my leg against the wall in a Cirque du Soleil maneuver trying to shave. While I’m trying to reach my ankles my mind wanders back to an episode of “20/20” on hidden cameras in locker rooms that are broadcasting footage of naked women to audiences in Hungary, but I’m so desperate to feel like a woman again that I don’t care if everyone in Eastern Europe can see my birth canal.

When the electricity comes on, part of me wishes it could have stayed off until our lease was up in May, because when I walk into my room my window appears to have vomited soggy towels. I pick them up and stuff them into the washing machine, which probably thinks it has earned its place in the second circle of hell with the rest of the gluttons. Or maybe not. I’m not sure how my washing machine feels about Dante.

Once the towels and trashcans are cleared, putting my room back together feels curative. The pieces start to come together to form what is familiar and natural as my surroundings – I lovingly rearrange my books, placing them in order by which I read them, and balance them next to the gold-hammered lamp my mother bought me after a rough break up. “You have to make your own light sometimes,” she told me in the aisle of Target, and set it down in the bottom of the cart, where it made a triumphant clang: Damn right. The embossed tray I bought at Stockley Gardens Art Festival of the antique birds’ eggs print leans against the window sill – holding our peacoats together in the blustery October wind, Ricky and I rummaged through the vendors’ stands and drank coffee and listened to a woman who had smoked cigarettes for forty years sing about Sloopy hanging on, and what a good day that was. The vase I painted in college – Fleurs – that my roommate accidentally dropped that made the rim look like it was smiling; the picture of my brother feeding pigeons in Piazza San Marco; my father’s Italian Valentine from last year that I framed in white porcelain; the first picture taken of my mother after she could walk again, the one where we are both sitting under the shady trees of the front lawn drinking iced tea, smiling tentatively but unreservedly, “The Survival Picture” she called it; all of these things keepsakes to the larger bits. They are not permanent – they are pulp and laquer and wood and ink – and easily destroyed. They are the material markers of the fragments that create a life, sign posts that let me to remember on mornings where I am buttoning my coat before the sun rises to suddenly remember that there are people and moments that combine with me like barbed wire, portions of what I’ve become and what I hope to be that could never really go away, come hell, or even high water.

Jonas Brothers and Modern Sexuality: hard truths learned in Seventeen.

I’m sitting at a marbleized faux-jade table in Kin’s Wok waiting for my chicken lo mein. “Teach Your Children Well” is playing over the speaker above the table, and someone has taped up two cut-outs of smiling ivory Chinese babies dressed in scarlet robes to the wall in front of me. There is a littering of business cards for A Step in Time Chimney Sweeps someone left on the counter, and I’ve already read those, so the only thing left for me, a compulsive reader on the border of neurotic, is a year-old issue of Seventeen magazine, which I have flipped open while waiting for an 82-year-old Chinese woman to screech that my noodles are ready.

The format is vastly different from when I was reading it at fourteen – in case you’ve never been a middle-class suburban white girl, no one who is seventeen actually reads Seventeen – and the pages are busier, splashier, filled with leggings and plastic cocktail rings and bubblegum lipgloss, and the models have long, wavy hair. For some reason, a vast majority of them are wearing berets.

So what is it like to be seventeen today?

In: Oversized wool cardigans.

Out: Glitter eyeshadow. (I could point you in the direction of a lot of Ocean View ladies who would vehemently disagree.)

Boys: Strawberry lip balm takes their breath away!

Embarrassing moments: My brother’s cute best friend walked in on me singing in the bathroom!

Four-page hard-hitting essays: My boyfriend asked me to touch him down there.

Most Seventeen articles do, and will likely always, revolve universal feminine truths: make-up is fun, bathing suit shopping sucks, dudes can be dickweasels. I’m pretty sure there are at least seven Dolly Parton songs that touch on all three of those subjects at once.

Then I turn the page.

BAM! I get Jonas Brother-ed.  

The pinnacle of modern sexuality.

 The “JoBros,” as they are sometimes called, are neutered singer-songwriters (?) with immaculately groomed eyebrows. I did a little research (drank a Strongbow and Google-searched them) and found that the youngest Jonas is 17, the middle (who may or may not be gay?) is 20, and the oldest is 22.

Oh, and they’re from Jersey.

The article is entitled: HOW TO BE A GREAT DATE! Advice from the Cutie-Cute Jonas Brothers! Now. I have never been a fan of “cutie-cute” anything. But I can certainly tell you that any dating advice I’ve gotten that’s been worth its salt has not been cute, nor has it been issued by barely post-pubescent males from New Jersey.

So let’s break this mother down:

 “I’m the most conservative when it comes to dating.” – Nick Jonas, 15. Conservative? You’re fif-fucking-teen. Of course you’re a conservative dater. This isn’t medieval France, where at fifteen your main concern was crapping out children to help you work the feudal lord’s field and getting your rocks off before you contracted the bubonic plague.

“I enjoy doing things for other people without expecting anything in return.” – Kevin Jonas, 20. Well. You know what I like, Kevin? Being lavished with praise for being so goddamn thoughtful all the time. Because fuck orphans, you know?

“I’m definitely the flirt of the group!” – Joe Jonas, 18. Well done, you’re the most popular guy with all the sailors down at the Rusty Anchor. You know what? Never mind. Too easy.  

After reading the article, I even took a quiz on which Jonas brother I would be My Perfect Match, since I’m closely following their dating advice now anyway. Questions included insightful inquiries such as: “What is your biggest fashion risk?” (Actual choice: A. Layering.)

After affirming that I liked Thanksgiving and bowling with my friends I got:

NICK JONAS!

Nick, like you, is young but wise beyond his years. Maybe you’ve gone through something life-changing, like Nick being diagnosed with diabetes in 2005, and the two of you would connect over that. This would give both of you a serious and realistic outlook on everything, but a strong passion for joy and experimentation. To find your perfect match in real life, look for a guy like Nick – a fun, understanding guy who you have a lot in common with!

Life-changing moments of mine I could share with Nick have included: waking up on the bathroom floor of the Sigma Pi House missing both shoes and a contact lens, meeting and eyefucking Creigh Deeds at brunch, and once believing for 9 hours that I had tampon with a broken string lodged in my vagina. But that last one is considered medical, just like diabetes. So I could totally connect with him on a deep and spiritual level over that. Also I’m sure he would be interested to know that I once drank two bottles of Melon Ball Boone’s Farm and threw up while I was laying my bed, so drunk that I couldn’t even get up to change the sheets. So in the morning, there I was, seriously hungover and realistically stuck to petrified sheet vomit. But Nick is fun and understanding, so I’m sure we can bond over that, too.

The most marketable part about the Jonas Brothers is that they pose zero risk to the female teen fan base that supposedly worships them, enough so that a magazine that used to answer questions about STD screenings and write exposés on sexual harassment in schools will use them as a journalistic condom, because why would teenage women want to formulate opinions on social and gender issues when they can read such gem advice as “Don’t tell a guy you love him on the first date.” (Thank you, Nick.)

Even more repulsive, one of their avid fans asked the middle brother (the gay one?) this question:

Q: WHY DO YOU WEAR A RING ON YOUR RING FINGER ON YOUR LEFT HAND?

A: It’s a purity ring. A promise to myself and to God to stay pure until marriage.

You know, once I poop out a daughter I may have a different opinion on this, but I think I would rather have my kid come home and tell me she was knocked up by a guy who served at Rikers than listen to some pre-pubescent fucktard spout that kind of crap at the dinner table. Then again that may depend on how good my family planning insurance is.

 Luckily, it’s nothing I have to decide now, for the Chinese counter lady calls, “Awh-RAH!” which means, “Laura, your lo mein is ready. Put down the teen magazine and proceed back to your tiny apartment and your bills and your dates with thirty-something bachelors.” And so I put down the magazine and I pick up my lo mein, which is wrapped in a bag with a yellow smiley face with commanding block letters around it that read: HAVE A NICE DAY.

And I am twenty-five, so I do.

Rating a Man By His Cheese: a How-To.

The Ultimate Judgement Tool.

 It is a truth universally acknowledged that you can judge a man by his cheese.

It’s true.

If a man likes American, be cagey. He’s not just mind-numbingly predictable; he’s numb, a flesh-covered boulder of carbon and patches of chest hair swaddled in a David Taylor polo. You’ll be spending your time watching the Saturday night movie on FX and eating in various Ruby Tuesdays where girls named Christine are the hostess, and he will dribble mayonnaise from his Bison Bacon Cheeseburger onto his chin and not notice because he’s too busy talking about how he needs to have his car serviced, and while he’s mumbling about how much a new catalytic converter is going to run him your eyes will be fixated on that white glob clinging to his chin and you’ll think to yourself, This is it. This is what I’ve chosen. And he’ll lift the burger to his mouth with that orange slice between two pieces of medium-broiled substandard pressed ground beef – and, well, that will be your life. You could make a run for it, but there’s no point – the door is being blocked by Christine, who is chewing a piece of chartreuse Strident and talking to three enlisted 19-year-olds, one of whom is going to get her pregnant in the next twenty days (though which one’s sperm did the actual fertilizing will be the question), and do you know why that is? Because they like American cheese, too. Your vagina is no match for American Cheese Men, all of whom are horrifyingly potent.

If man likes Cheddar, keep an eye open. Cheddar is that unsettling neon orange color, almost identical to American, only sourer, which makes you wonder if they didn’t leave a wedge of it soaked in urine out overnight. Cheddar comes off as a sophisticated choice now and again, especially when paired with pouched salmon eggs or whatever it is the kids are smoking it with these days, but the truth is, it is the cheese of the nouveau riche. Cheddar is the choice for people who snicker at American for being déclassé and then buy a house on the oceanfront and name it Life’s a Beach. Cheddar Men are a healthy mix of Adidas cologne, megalomania, and Fox News. Men who perceive themselves as a wellspring of originality and then proceed to wear Old Navy flip-flops are not men in which you should be allowing entry into your vagina – sorry, Cheddar Men, these ladyparts are premium parking, and you need to go find some handicapped lot down the street.

If a man likes Pepper Jack, take the utmost care. He likes his ladies like he likes his Tupperware: easily stored in the fridge. He ain’t nothing but danger. This is especially true of men who like pepper jack cheese on their eggs. Jesus, these kinds of men are the worst. Who the hell needs something that piquant first thing in the morning? Clearly not someone who is concerned about SBS (Spicy Butthole Syndrome) for the rest of the day, meaning they’re the sort of men who have zero qualms about taking a dump in your guest bathroom mid-morning while reading your Glamour. They’re probably also super into anal, for reasons which I have not yet scientifically correlated but likely relate to their comfort with poop issues. And by anal, I don’t necessarily mean your anus. You can spot them before they order, as most of them are in fatigues.

If a man likes Muenster, he’s at least interesting, though likely a bit showy. If he wasn’t Ivy League, he had dreams of getting there which were likely crushed by socialized fundamentalism. I mean, structuralized functionalism. I mean, subsidized socialization. He smokes a lot of a cigarettes. His glasses are wire-rimmed. He owns at least three Brooks Brothers ties. He has Japanese prints in his living room. He will switch to Roquefort as soon as the trust fund left to him by his grandfather, a newspaper mogul, kicks in at thirty-five.

If a man likes Swiss, he’s what we here in the business call “a keeper.” Nice Jewish boys order Swiss. Husband material orders Swiss. Not too intense, pairs well with everything. Lovely grilled, and tastes comforting just out of the plastic-sealed package. As an added bonus, you can thread your tongue through one of the cheese holes, and, taking care to make small and gentle bites, fashion a heart with your teeth, making it the most romantic of the cheeses.

Gruyère, the fondue cheese? Gay. But a lot of fun to shop with. And they always make the best blowjob jokes.

I suppose you could argue that these are all broad oversimplifications, but, as is so often the case when I make sweeping generalizations based on my own blind cheese prejudices, I can earnestly assure you that I don’t care.

Red, White and Brunch.

The most exciting thing I anticipated happening at No Frill Bar & Grill’s most excellent brunch was that I would get gravy on my biscuits, thus further alleviating the slight hangover I had going from the night before, but when I turned the car down Spotswood Avenue and spotted the CREIGH DEEDS FOR GOVERNER bus, I should have realized that gravy-laden bread soaking up the renegade alcohol I had trouncing around my system would be but a footnote in our day of brunchiness.

Ricky and Ursula, also in the car with heads hung, were slightly under the weather – Ursula because she had a few more beers than she had originally anticipated and Ricky because of lack of sleep. Ricky, a light sleeper as it is, had foolishly allowed me to settle up in her bed after a night of drinking, and consequently paid the price. “I have never, never in my life,” Ricky hisses at me upon our waking, “heard someone moan as much as you in their sleep. I’m not George Clooney sleeping next to you, what do you have to moan about? Or snore so fast! You must have the heartbeat of a fucking gerbil.” She had kicked me several times during the night, but as a tree could have fallen through her roof and literally between the two of us and likely not rouse me, her abuse did little more than provide me with slightly bruised shins come dawn. It was a small consolation for her.

So when we spot the CREIGH DEEDS FOR GOVERNOR bus, emblazoned in yellow and white blue and parked on the left of the one way street, my initial reaction is not, “Some of the most important figures of Virginian government could be on that bus, and they’re right here in my own neighborhood,” but rather, “Who parked this fucking bus right here?!” I grip the steering wheel and narrow my eyes, as though this will help navigate around it, and screech, “Right here. RIGHT HERE! Like this street is so wide you could park a goddamn tour bus on it! Goddamit. GODDAMIT.” Ursula and Ricky, still hazy, nod in agreement, and when I make it past the bus and into the parking lot, I shoot the monstrous vehicle a dirty look in my rearview. It does not seem to notice.

We walk into No Frill and put our names down. It will be somewhat of a wait, which is a small price to pay for the best chicken and gravy in town. We take a seat on a hard wooden bench, and a woman across from us talks loudly about how much she likes Clarks; she is wearing a pair of them right then, black clogs that resemble Peter Boyle’s in Young Frankenstein, which she as paired with chartreuse socks with cartoon spiders all over them. “They are just so COMFORTABLE,” she tells her dining partner, a woman with an eye patch on who nods in agreement but I deduce that her dominate eye is clearly the one with the patch, if she is truly in agreement. After five minutes of this, the bench starts to feel like a pew, and I figure having to sit for 15 minutes and listen to someone talk about their style preferences when what they think is really fetching is Halloween socks on November 1 while I’m hungover on a Sunday morning is likely my karmic penance for not taking a vested interest in organized religion in the first place. We were all meant to be miserable on Sunday mornings at some point.

Leo, a photographer I know from the paper, comes through the door. “Hey!” he says. “What are you doing here?”

“Trying to cattle prod my hangover with chicken biscuits,” I tell him. He has his camera by his side. “Are you working?”

“Doing a story for the Deeds campaign,” he says, and nods his head towards the corner, where several people in suits are hovered around a booth.

“Oh, I didn’t realize they were coming in.”

“Brunch, I guess,” Leo says. “I’ll come by if they make their way to your table.” Leo adjusts his press pass, shakes his eyebrows, and makes his way over to the booth.

When the host calls our name, we shoot up as though we were on fire and he has the only bucket of water in the building.

He seats us on the patio. I order a regular coffee and Ursula opts for a mimosa – a hair of the dog, if you will – and Ricky, more traditional, goes for a huge glass of water. We order our chicken and biscuits and are in the middle of discussing our opinions on escort ads when a huge commotion erupts at the entrance of No Frill. The milk-colored glass distorts our view from the patio, but several people are walking in, and there are cameras and boom mikes behind them. The restaurant hits a new sphere of energy, people craning their necks and leaning over the table to their dining partners. I hear someone say, “That’s the governor!” I can’t see him clearly, but there is someone standing in the entryway. He is talking with to somebody, and I wonder if the woman with the chartreuse spider socks has cornered him to let him know her opinion on footwear.

The waitress brings our chicken and biscuits, and the three of us are far too ravenous to concentrate on the parade of Democrats, no matter how much we admire them. A hungry stomach, sadly, will always trump a bleeding heart.

The moments where your life changes are sometimes very recognizable, incredibly instant: a stroll through the crosswalk that leaves you giving your name to a fireman in the back of an ambulance, turning the corner with a car-full of groceries and catching your partner out with someone else, walking into your front door and seeing furniture toppled and your television missing; but how was to know that spilling gravy on the front of my shirt would lead to a life-changing moment? How could I know that when I, in an uncoordinated state, let a glob of chicken gravy faint from my fork and settle on right breast that it would lead to a moment in time that I would replay over and over in my head, likely plaguing me until I am an old woman, prostrate in my hospital bed, toppled brunch drippings my deepest regret?

But when it fell, I thought little of it. I took my cloth napkin and wiped it off, ignorant that the grey smear against my salmon-colored top would be perhaps the greatest political, not to mention social, downfall of my life.

For the patio door swings open, and out comes a man in a simple steel-grey blazer and a red and navy blue tie. He has nicely styled but unfussy hair, and what strikes me most about him is how humble he seems when he steps up to a table in the corner, a young couple sharing cheese dip, and says, “Hello, I’m Creigh Deeds.”

“Oh, my God,” Ricky says. The three of us stare at him until finally a camera man tries to get a shot and hinders our view.

“Are we going to meet him?” I ask, and feel a pull of joy until I remember that I have an enormous gravy stain on my shirt. “Shit,” I say, trying to scratch it off with my fingernails. Creigh Deeds makes his way to the next table, and we get a better look at him.

“Damn, he is cute,” Ricky says. “Those ads don’t do him justice.”

“He is handsome,” Ursula politely agrees. She’s from Massachusetts, Kennedy territory, where they’re used to having sexy politicians.

Creigh Deeds spots our table. Ursula takes a napkin and folds it politely in her lap. Ricky takes a napkin and covers up her desecrated chicken and biscuits. I take a napkin and hold it against my gravy breast.

“This is so exciting!” I whisper, and then to Ursula, who has never been to a Ghent brunch before, I bubble, “This usually doesn’t happen at brunch.”

Creigh Deeds catches my last sentence and looks at us bashfully. “Forgive me for interrupting,” he says. He looks at the cameras behind him and says with an odd amount of apology, “Sorry about this, they just sort of follow me around.” He looks at us with sheepish brown eyes and we are sold.

“No!” says Ricky. “Not at all!”

“Well, I hope you’ll come out and vote on Tuesday,” he tells us, and shakes our hands. “We would really, really appreciate the support.” His voice is soft but confident, not at all like a politician’s, but that’s what I like about him. He thanks us for our time, apologizes for interrupting again, and moves on to the next table. We are smitten.

“He was precious,” I coo.

“Very nice man,” says Ursula.

“Totally hot,” Ricky says. Ricky immediately whips out her iPhone and updates her status: Just met Creigh Deeds. Very firm handshake, great ass, too.

We are finishing our plates when Jody Wagner, candidate for lieutenant governor, stops by. She is petite and wears a fetching black suit with white trim, and small silver earrings. “Hello, I’m Jody Wagner,” she says. She tells us that she’s running and hopes we will come out and vote. “And bring your friends!”

“I love to vote,” says Ricky.

“We will bring our friends,” I tell her. I have Ursula’s unfinished mimosa in my hand. “We’ll get everyone together. We’ll drink mimosas and then go vote!”

The idea sounded better in my head.

Jody Wagner likes this, and adds emphatically, “YES! I might do the same!” She makes her way to the next table and the three of us decide that if we ever had the choice of going out drinking with a politician, she would be the clear choice: Ursula because of her vested interest in feminist studies, me because I appreciate anyone with a personality, and Ricky because she believes Jody Wagner looks like she could pound a glass of bourbon.

We meet Steven Shannon, who is quite cute, and then there is a slight drop off of candidates making the rounds. We pay the bill and are just about to leave when the patio door swings open again and a man comes up to our table. I recognize him as Glenn Nye.

Glenn Nye is dressed in an impeccably tailored navy blue suit which stands rigid on his narrow but erect shoulders. His hair is chestnut, cut close in the typical Democratic ’do, something that says I’m no hippie but I can grow a good head of hair because I am young and vibrant and have new ideas but I’m definitely not a socialist, old people. He is good-looking, though not necessarily immediately striking, but he has startling grey eyes and their contact is so concentrated that suddenly he becomes the most handsome man on the patio.

“Are you ladies all from Norfolk?” he asks.

“No, Massachusetts,” Ursula says.

“YES, WE ARE FROM NORFOLK,” Ricky and I say in unison, and lean towards him with our eyelashes fluttering.

“Nice to meet you,” he says, shaking our hands. “I’m Glenn Nye.”

Because I was afraid I would miss the huge chance to really show him I was a savvy, politically-oriented woman with a liberal background and a penchant for hot dudes in suits, I forget about my gravy bosom and hear myself say, “I just read your Wikipedia entry!”

What. The. Fuck. Was. I. Doing.

Glenn Nye stares at me with his steely eyes and says, “Really? Was it good?”

“Yes,” I say. “Good.”

“Lot of biographical information on there,” he says.

“Yes,” I say. “Lots.”

He continues, “The governor will be coming around to meet you soon.” We turn around and there is Tim Kaine, dressed in a faded jean jacket and nice trousers, shaking the hand of the cheese-sharing couple.

Ricky sighs dreamily, “He’s in denim! Like a cowboy.”

“Oh, I guess he is,” says Glenn Nye.

I find myself saying out loud, “I can’t believe the governor of Virginia is coming over and I spilled biscuits on myself.”

“Did you?” says Glenn Nye. “Where?”

“Here,” I say, and point to my chest. In hindsight, I will never understand why he didn’t seize that golden moment to invite a woman who was so classy to point out that she had spilled brunch on her tits to invite me back to the campaign bus for a glass of merlot, but I like to think it was simply an issue of time constraints.

“It doesn’t look bad,” he lies.

Not to be outdone, Ricky mentions, “I VOTE IN EVERY ELECTION.”

“Great!” says Glenn Nye. “So you’ll be out Tuesday, because it’s a close race and we could really use your support.”

“I WILL BE THERE,” Ricky says.

Leo comes up behind Glenn Nye and takes pictures of him talking with us, giving me a thumbs up that probably signals, I see you looking at his crotch.

Glenn Nye thanks us for our time and walks away. We are drunk from his magnetism and the strong mimosa we were sharing between the three of us, and are just basking in the haze of charm he has left lingering at our table when Tim Kaine comes up and says, “I saw you ladies talking to Glenn Nye.” He doesn’t wink but it is implied that he is doing so vocally. I imagine when they get on the campaign bus Tim Kaine will probably crow, “Did y’all see Glenn talking to those three girls on the patio? Oh, Glenn – so good with the young ladies.” Then Tim Kaine will nudge Glenn Nye with his elbow and wink, and Glenn Nye will laugh quietly, too professional to mention that, upon meeting him, one of the girls forced him to look at her breast.

We finally get up from the table and make our way towards the door, and we run into Tim Kaine again. He smiles at us and gestures for us to go ahead of him. “Ladies,” he smiles. We get in the car and can barely contain ourselves.

“What an exciting brunch,” coos Ursula.

“I wouldn’t have been more excited if I had met Brad Pitt,” I sigh.

“That Creigh Deeds,” says Ricky. “Jesus, what a great ass.”

Though they say the GOP will likely sweep the election, I am pleased to say that, fifteen years from now, when I’m driving my children past the GLENN NYE FOR PRESIDENT bus that has parked itself on a narrow Norfolk street, I can say, “Hey, I forced awkward Wikipedia conversation onto that man once, and even made him glance at my boob.” And perhaps I can remind him of it again, should I meet him out someday. Because really, a love of the Constitution and the everyday American citizens and their gravy breasts are what shaped this country – and, really, isn’t that what politics is all about in the first place?

Little Secrets.

What I will likely remember most about my Thanksgivings, a time where my entire family set aside their weekend and drove to Richmond to meet at the home of my grandmother, the family matriarch, is the time my grandmother put down her spoonful of cranberry sauce and preceded to tell us that it’s hard for men not to ejaculate once they get to a certain summit in any said sexual act.

“There comes a point where a man just can’t stop,” she tells us in her Old Virginia drawl, blotting her fuchsia lipstick with a paper napkin imprinted with blue hydrangeas. She sets the crumbled napkin next to her plate, filled with slices of tanned turkey, and takes a sip of unsweetened iced tea. “So when you have this Kobe Bryant – now, I don’t know if the sex with this girl was consensual or not, now, so I’m not saying either way because I was not there – “

“Jesus, I hope not,” I hear my dad mutter.

“ – but I do know that these women that say a man rapes them, but if they change their minds halfway through, there comes a point where a man just can’t control himself. He has to finish.” She puts her hand on my arm as she expels the word finish from her mouth, maybe because I am the only fertile woman in the room or more likely because I am sitting closest to her, but I purse my lips into a pained grin and nod thusly. The room is hushed except for the sound of her two dogs chewing their turkey bones in the foyer.

My grandmother loved a scandal, particularly a sexual one. So when Kobe Bryant’s rape case hit the papers, my grandmother flipped the channels of the TV accordingly so she wouldn’t miss any coverage of the basketball star’s fall from fame. If there was one thing she enjoyed, it was the theatrics of a good meltdown.

“I don’t know if they’ll find out this girl is lying or what,” my grandmother continues, shaking her fork at the room. “But they’ll have to take into consideration that when you have sex with a man, he can’t just pull out when you want him to. It’s timing.”

My mother sits on the couch next to her sister Courtney, and they both throw a horrified look to their brother Chris, who is chewing a mouthful of green beans while trying not to laugh. My brother and my cousin, both middle school boys, less controlled than my uncle – who, in all fairness, had forty-five years to learn to contain himself – start to giggle.

“You laugh now,” my grandmother says. “But you wait until you see what I’m talking about.”

“Lord, Jesus,” I hear my father murmur into his mashed potatoes. He regrets that both his parents are dead, not just because he loved them, but because now this is the only place he has to go for holidays.

I shuffle the turkey slices around on my plastic red plate, a staple of our Thanksgiving dinners once we realized that none of us cared enough to use the fine china, and eye my mother, who is sitting on the couch with a plate of sweet potatoes looking good and horrified. She’s had a long day. Though the turkey was prepared by Ukrop’s, it still had to be cooked, a thankless task that went to my mother. Worse, the turkey drippings were running hot in the oven and burst into flames. Worse than even that, it was my grandmother who discovered the diminutive catastrophe.

“Oh, shit, Nemi, the turkey is on fire!” my grandmother hollers. My mother runs into the minute shotgun kitchen and the two of them wave oven mitts wildly at the small flames rising from the stove.

“Oh, shit, oh shit!” my mother wails. “Move, Mama!”

She tries to place my grandmother to the side, but my grandmother is still shouting instructions. “You have to douse it, Nemi! You have to douse it!”

My aunt runs in and the three of them try to shout at the flames, under the mistaken belief that if you yell loud enough at a fire it will eventually put itself out, and smoke starts to billow from the outskirts of turkey drippings. The dogs take the chaotic opportunity to waddle through the kitchen and see what the commotion is about. My uncles stand to the side and sip their Miller Lites. My father is in the living room working on the crossword puzzle. “I got to do two crosswords in one day,” he tells me while the cries of my mother and aunt resound through the house. “One in our paper and one in the Richmond one. Not bad. Almost got this one completely finished, too.”

The yelling subsides and the three women back away from the oven. My mother is holding the aluminum pan the turkey has fainted in, and drops it onto the stove-top with a dull thud. Thuck. “Whew,” she sighs. She pokes part of the blackened skin. “Fuck.”

“It doesn’t look bad, Nemi,” my aunt offers. “We just pull that skin up and it’s fine. Look, it’s just that part there that burned.”

My mother peels back the turkey crust with a look of disgust, throwing it in the trashcan like it was a roach.

I am leaning against the laundry room door watching my mother mentally calculate how many Xanax she has brought for the weekend and what is a safe number to take with two glasses of merlot  and still have some left over for Black Friday when my grandmother comes up and takes my arm. “Now, Laura, the turkey was on fi-yah,” she laughs. She leans into me as though we are sharing a grave secret. “Now, you know that’s funny.” When she pulls back her fuchsia lips into a smile they reveal her white teeth, beautifully straight but slightly angled out, a very British mouth. My father had always teased her for looking like the Queen of England, whom she was oddly the exact same age as, a comparison she didn’t much care for her son-in-law to make. “She’s ugly!” my grandmother would sniff.

“Ugly,” my mother would mutter when my grandmother would leave the room to get ham sandwiches from the kitchen. “I don’t think she’s ugly. I think she looks like an eighty-year-old woman. Because that’s what she is.” Before my grandmother would come back, my mother would add, “And she has all those damn dogs shitting all over the palace. Just like Mama, only on a grander scale.”

Until I was ten, I slept with my grandmother in her bed when we’d visit her. She slept in pink, cushioned curlers, the kind you think are only in movies when the director is trying to make someone look especially old and hideous, but she looked sweet in them, like a teenager getting ready for a dance. Over her bed was a picture of a colonial girl in a pink dress holding a pink rose. It was a striking portrait because no matter where you walked, the girl’s eyes seemed to stay fixed on you. When we cleaned out my grandmother’s house, my mother asked me whether there was anything I wanted, and I said, “The colonial girl.” I hung it over my bed. A guy I was seeing used to tease me that it was haunted, and would whisper that she was watching us while we laid in bed after sex. But guarding my grandmother and her curlers while she slept was the only way I could see her, and the threats of post-coital hauntings were nonexistent in my head.

My first offhanded sex advice I got from my grandmother. “You have to watch those men in business suits,” she tells me one day. We’re sitting on her living room couch and she’s balancing a Coca-Cola wrapped in a paper towel on her knee. “They look respectable, sitting in the mall eating lunch in the food court, but the truth is, I see them eyeing you. Thinking, Oh, what’s she got under there?” The way it sounds when she imitates their voice sounds more lecherous than if it came from a convicted sex offender. She adds, “Those are the kind of men that pee in a restaurant and don’t wash and then put their hands in the mints on the way out.” I find myself strangely revolted by men in business suits to this day, as I know they secretly undress me with their eyes while they eat Peppermint Starlights coated in urine.

“When are you going to grad school?” she would ask me.

“As soon as I can figure out how to pay for it and not live in a cardboard box behind a Denny’s,” I tell her.

“You need to go,” my grandmother says. “You’re the kind of person who does so well in school because you like to learn and you don’t like to sit around. You’re afraid of being idle.” What surprised me about this was that I always considered that my grandmother knew very little about me; she knew my major, but she couldn’t have told you my favorite book or what movies I liked. We had a blanket relationship rather than focusing on the details. But what really surprised me was that she was right.

The older I get, the more concerned she becomes about my dating life – oddly, not that I will never settle, but that I will. “You need to date around,” she tells me. “Don’t latch onto the first boy that gets his hands on you, because, Laura, they all want to call to the shots.” I had never met my grandfather, but from what I hear he was an inoffensive, droll band teacher whose crippling anxiety prevented him from driving over bridges. He hardly seemed like a shot-caller, but something was pissing my grandmother off about men, and while she never told me directly what it was, she did give me a horrifying Dr. Laura Schlessinger book for my birthday entitled 10 Stupid Things Women Do to Mess Up Their Lives, and signed it with love in the inside cover. “I think this has a lot of good advice,” she had told me upon the unwrapping. How Do I Teach a Man to Respect Me? one of the chapters asks. I look up at her and she sips her Coca-Cola through a thin white straw, a blue line going up the middle.

I visit her one weekend. We sit in the living room and read together. “You’re smart,” she tells me suddenly, and I look up at her blankly. “You’re a smart girl and don’t you let anyone tell you differently. And don’t you ever let anyone treat you like you’re not, either.”

I got the call she had fallen one evening from my mother. “Chris found her on the floor of the foyer,” Mom says. “She had been there for hours, Laura. And the first thing she did – “

My mother stops and I think that she is sobbing.

“What? Mom, what?”

“ – the first thing she does is ask him,” my mother continues, and I realize she’s laughing that astringent laugh, the one where you’ve given up on fighting the humor in even the most critical situation, “is ask him if he wants a soda.”

I see her in the hospital and she is much paler than I’ve ever seen. Her hair, which has gone un-dyed, is electric white, and sticks up in tufts from where she’s been laying her head on the thin hospital pillows. She calls me Paige, the name of her niece, but tells me that I’m pretty and that she’s glad I came. We visit for a while and when I tell her I’m going to leave, she starts to mumble something incoherent, and then her eyes look up at me. “I was in a boat and I was so scared,” she tells me suddenly, and starts to cry. I’ve never seen her cry, not once, and so when she weeps and it sounds like she’s a kid, lost and impatient with herself, my throat prickles and I find my face scorching trying to hold back my own alarm. A nurse comes in with lunch and she calms down slightly, and he says he is going to change her IV. “I’m going to give you a little privacy,” I tell my grandmother, and the nurse smiles warmly, a kindness just enough to make my eyes water when I leave the room.

I walk through the hallway. It smells like bleach and cherry lollipops, oddly. The waiting room chairs are upholstered in grotesque blue-grey vinyl. There are brochures in the lobby reclining in a pine holder, huge black knots stamped into the wood. Plants stand in peach-colored vases, their leaves drooping in a filmy wax.  Goddamit, I think when the hospital doors float open to the outside. She’s gone. The sun stings my eyes. I watch someone wheel an old man into the hospital lobby. He stares blankly ahead. He is wearing a black hat too big for his head, pushing down the tops of his eyebrows and I want to shake the person staring at him and tell them to just get the man a hat that fits. No fucking thank you.

The nurse is just finishing up when I walk back in, and he smiles again as we trade places, he into the hallway that smells of bleach and lollipops and I at her bedside. “That hurt,” she whispers and looks at her IV.

“I know,” I say. “But you’re okay.” I smile at her as if I believe it to be true.

Her lunch is sitting in front of her. “You want some of this?” I ask her. “Looks good.”

“Take my roll,” she says. “I don’t want it.”

Her request surprises me.

“No, eat it,” I say. “It’s good.”

“No, I don’t want it,” she says. “And they make you eat it here. You eat it.”

“Buckey, I don’t want it,” I say, using the name I’ve called her since I was a child, since the days she would take me in her Oldsmobile over the small Richmond hills that felt like mountainsides the way she drove, faster than probably she should have at her age and with a five-year-old in the car, but we drove anyway and she would say in her gruffest voice, “I’m a racecar driver!” And the hills would embrace us in their tender paved curves, the trees and the sun blurring by in a haze of emerald and honeyed fragments.

“Laura,” she laughs, and it is the first time I heard her say my name since she forgot everything about us, and the last time I’ve heard it since, but there it was, ringing in the air, quietly in its way, an icicle between moments, a splinter of books and Kobe Bryant theories and that damned white napkin she always had under a sweating Coca-Cola. “Eat some.”

So I pick up the roll and I break it in half, and she places her fragment of it in her mouth and I take a little of my piece in mine. Neither one of us wants it but we eat it, and she leans into me and smiles, her lips pulled back and her straight teeth and how I remember that gold watch she used to wear around her neck and the sound of her pressing the foot pedals of the piano and her arm leaning into my shoulder like she is sharing some life secret she forgot, at one point during our time together, to say.

From my father.

“Before I met your mama, all I cared about was drinking, chasing women, and antiquing.” – Pops.

An Open Letter to My Creepy-Ass Neighbor.

Dear Creepy-Ass Neighbor:

I first spotted you several months ago, hanging around inside the chipped white doorframe of your appalling bachelor pad, an apartment so dilapidated that should the occasion arise that we have to give the neighborhood of Ghent an enema, your abode is where we will likely stick the hose. Your chest hair is auburn. I know this because you were shirtless.

It was around 8 p.m. I had just gotten off work. I was walking from my car to my apartment, and I’m sure you heard the click-clacking of my high heels, which signaled to you that a.) there was a woman within 50 feet of your dwelling, and b.) that said woman would derive pleasure in being wolf-whistled at by someone who, measured by the spectrum of modern scientific advances, contradicts all known evidence of human evolution.

My response was to whip my head around like I was the understudy for Linda Blair in The Exorcist and make my most aghast face. I thought this might effectively serve as an indication that I even the mere suggestion of attraction on my part was thoroughly non-existent. You wiggle your eyebrows at me anyway. I scowl.

So then I see you a few days later, around the same time. This time, I am walking to my car and you are standing at your screened-in living window, and when I make the grave mistake of glancing at who-in-the-hell-is-staring-at-me, I am met with your husky, “Hey.” And this, sir, was no ordinary hey, one that signifies, Hello, neighbor, lovely night we’re having. It wasn’t even a, Sorry you’ve caught me shirtless again, standing at my window – I’m terribly embarrassed for the gauche, but maybe if I say hello we can both alleviate our mutual discomfort. This was a lecherous hey. This is a hey that says I want to bend you over the apartment city-issued trashcans and touch you in your underwear places.

As time progressed I got used to having you around. I would park my car, walk past your apartment, and you would be, in what appears to be an inordinate amount of free time (perhaps you’re unemployed?), standing at your door, clearing your throat until I look over in annoyance. It was a process.

Until yesterday.

I parked my car – at noon, mind you – and I saw you standing at your window.

Taking. A. Shower.

What kills me – what fucking kills me – is that you took no pains to hide the fact that you were bathing. You lathered up your hair and stared at me at the same time. You even flashed me a smile. And while it was disturbing that you were scouring your head and watching me, it wasn’t nearly as unsettling as when you put your right hand down where I couldn’t see it. Christ. Jesus.

To your credit, you didn’t leave it where I couldn’t see it for long, but just by looking at you, I would guess it probably doesn’t take a whole lot to get you where you want to be, either.

Well. Allow me to enlighten you.

I have been masturbated to by men more daring than you. One (that I know of) was even in public. He got arrested for it. That may be sickening, but goddamit, that’s dedication. I’ve had several other verbal confirmations of said act, mainly by drunk guys (“Sometimes…I think about you.”), and I’ve done a little math:

First we have to deduce how many men are whacking it to me on a given day. If you count the number of men I see on a daily basis (roughly 300, but we’ll say 265 since I hang around with a lot of gay dudes, but I am adding 4 for lesbians, equaling out to 269) minus 50 (I’m not so self-important to think that everyone is masturbating to me), multiplied by 6 days a week (I’m assuming that as we live a quasi-conservative area that no one would ever masturbate on a Sunday), we have me being masturbated to by 1254 people a week. That’s 65,208 per year, and multiplied by the 11 years I’ve been post-pubescent, that totals up to 717,288 people. And of these 717,288 people, isn’t it peculiar that only you and another dude I pressed charges against are the only ones who are amateurish enough to get caught? So 717, 288 – 2 = you are a fucking dickwaffle. That math does itself.

And if me schooling you in pervy calculus isn’t enough, take this little fact into account: I serve up bagels to roughly 10 cops a day in Yorgo’s, all of whom, if prompted with a breakfast burrito, would be more than happy to pay you a visit.

 

Yours,

Laura C. Watkins, esq. (Thought I’d fancy it up a bit.)

 

P.S. – I will be pleased to buy you curtains for your bathroom window. Perhaps something in taupe?

Voice of a Generation.

My dad and I are walking past the record shop Skinnie’s on our way to Yorgo’s to get an Everything bagel toasted with herb cream cheese and a honey wheat bagel toasted with light butter, respectively, when my father stops and points to black shirt emblazoned with a white screen-print of a decaying skull and above it, a band name: GOAT ORGY.

“Goat…orgy,” my father reads, sounding out each syllable as if he were new to the English language. Then he looks at me, one eyebrow raised. “Who are they?”

“Dad, I don’t know!” I sigh. It’s early. I am ready for coffee, holding a purple mug with Goddess painted on it, a gift from my parents for my 23^rd birthday. People with purple Goddess mugs, as a general rule, do not listen to any band with the word “orgy” in the name.  

“You don’t know what they sing?” he asks. He slides his reading glasses up on his nose and cranes his neck towards the window for a closer look. Then he looks at me as though I hand-selected the members of Goat Orgy myself, standing outside the locales of known cult congregations in my best pantsuit to solicit Church of Satan members for auditions and to pass out free Kool-Aid. 

“I doubt they do much singing,” I say, and open the door to the bagel shop for him.

“Heh, Goat Orgy,” my dad chuckles as he walks inside.

Because the members of Goat Orgy were probably born in the 80s, 70s at the latest, it somehow means that we are peers, even though I have never attended a concert that doesn’t involve the acoustic guitar with the exception of the Virginia Symphony fall showcase and somehow I doubt Goat Orgy is terribly interested in the 5-hour BBC version of Pride and Prejudice, but since we are young we must all be in cahoots, a plot to turn the world into our personal orgiastic playground, corrupting the arts with our goat music and making reality shows instead of curing lupus. Or at least my father must think this. He looks at me over his reading glasses while he eats his Everything bagel. Goat Orgy, I can hear him think. Jesus.

There are many things associated with my generation that I can neither explain nor defend. Music, for instance. Besides Goat Orgy, I’ve never been particularly attached to pop ballads, and God knows I can’t explain the appeal of boy bands, a sprinkling of pre-pubescent men singing their asexual songs of blind devotion to throngs of women who adore them for presumably being neutered (I’m looking your way, New Kids). Call me old-fashioned if you will, but I would rather have a man take a dump in the middle of my living room than sing me a sterilized love song. On the other side of the spectrum is hardcore gangster rap (gansta? How are the kids spelling that these days?), which, though it can be broken down and assessed as rhythmic urban social commentary, I don’t care much for the delivery or the tone, mostly because I have the soul of a 76-year-old man (“Why are these people yelling? This isn’t music. THIS ISN’T MUSIC.”). Though, in my defense, I do own a CD entitled Old School Hip Hop, on sale at Target for $6.99, which serves as a scathing commentary on the bastardization of music culture, capitalism, and my own suburbanity. I don’t care. I’d stand my ground for the Sugarhill Gang any day (“Now that’s when rappers made music. THAT’S WHEN RAPPERS MADE MUSIC.”).

And if you need cold, hard proof that we live in a spiteful and unjust world, take note that The Fray has a record that was certified double-platinum while some people have still never heard of Rufus Wainwright.

Other things associated with my generation that I do not remember putting my stamp of approval upon: not using sunscreen, Kanye West and his glasses that function as Venetian blinds, the entire Twilight series, wearing sweatpants with PINK emblazoned across ass, The Hills, martini-themed decor, Linkin Park, the term “sexting”, Jackass: The Movie, claiming one doesn’t like to read, and sex before marriage (just fucking around on the last one. Sorry to get your hopes up, Ma.).

And then I find myself editing the obituary for a guy I graduated high school with, killed in action in Afghanistan, and when I go to file his picture in the archives, I look at his face and he looks back at me and as I have yet to hear one compelling argument as to why we’re still fighting, one solid case, I don’t really know what to tell him, either. Because he’s real and we are real and the whole thing is real, and when I lock the file drawer it all feels a little too finite.

So there are many things I can’t explain. My father doesn’t believe it, of course. He eats his bagel, shaking the seeds that fall onto the paper plate under it back onto the cream cheese. I want to question him, too, for many things: Jerry Lee Lewis, for instance. What the hell was going on there? And why did it take so long to work out that smoking was a bad idea? Who decided Nixon was a good idea? I suppose we could do this all morning long if we really wanted to, but Dad gets up and throws away his herb-covered napkin and grins at me, opening the red-lacquer door of the bagel shop for me, letting particles of sunlight burst onto floor when we exit.

We walk past Skinnie’s, dozens of alternative band t-shirts hanging in the window, all black, one with the Queen’s face whited out, another with lettering so distorted even I, a member of the generation that inspired it, can’t make it out, and GOAT ORGY hanging front and center. We walk past, and if Dad still cares about it, he doesn’t say so.

We get to his car and he turns to me. “Love you, sweetie,” he says, and puckers up his lips, plants a kiss on me the way he has done for twenty-five years now, and gets into his car. When he starts it up I hear the clear sound of his New Orleans Jazz Funeral CD playing through his car speakers, with trumpets blaring as he puts the car in reverse, the explosion of drums and the clambering of saxophones, and he waves out the window and honks twice as he drives away. I’m standing back in front of Skinnie’s as I watch him. The morning is warm and the sun is piercing, the glare from the glass storefront blinding me to the reflection of the cars passing by, and me, and the t-shirts sitting in the window, white flags, every one of us.