I’m fairly positive that I was placed on this earth for two reasons: one, obviously, is to decorate the living hell out of any domicile in which I dwell so it looks as though Liberace himself has come down from the heavens above to be reincarnated into my flaming wall color. The other reason, I’m starting to believe, is for me to be thrust into awkward situations where people think I’m weird.
I don’t consider myself a “weird” person, though I do consider myself as someone with poor spatial reasoning, which is the reason that I’m pretty conspicuous in many situations. For instance, at the gas station, I can never get my car to park at an angle where I can both 1) have the hose reach my gas tank, and 2) actually get out of my car. It’s always the same story: I park too close to the gas pumps, and then all those around me can only see a blur of brown hair, blue purse, and floral pins trying to force its way out of the car door, which is pinned tightly against the Exxon “Ultimate” fuel. When I finally find a way to suck my chest down and squeeze through the tiny door opening, so much so that I believe my breasts are going to implode, I find, much to my chagrin, that I have parked at an angle so awkward that I cannot get the hose to reach the gas tank.
And the vicious cycle starts again.
You can imagine that me getting into my car, starting it up, and parking it again causes quite a stir at the gas station, particularly if there is a line, which stresses me out to no end. Usually I have to give pathetic looks to the person behind me while I mouth, ”Sorry! I have poor spatial reasoning!” But at that point, it’s usually a frightened mother in a minivan who has ordered her school-age children to lock all the doors while the entire family stares at me in a sort of scared fascination, not unlike spectators observing feeding-time for canivorous jackels at the zoo.
The only thing that makes this situation worse is when one particular gas station attendant comes out to hit on me.
His name is Roy. I know this because it’s embroidered on his shirt, which is stained with a mixture of oil and chewing tobacco. He’s not a bad guy, but I don’t think he realizes how creepy he comes off with one bloodshot eye at all times. I could say that he’s always there, lurking, waiting for me to arrive at his place of business, but, truth be told, I’m not hard to spot. When he sees the traffic backed up from pump number five into the street, he knows that I’ve arrived. The general scenario is, I’ll be furiously fiddling with the gas tank cap, and I’ll see him lean against the garage door, oily wrench in hand, wiping his brow with a red cloth and giving me as seductive look as a thirty-something greasemonkey can give. At this point I’m fitfully praying that he’ll just stay where he is, or go back into the shop to finish up the Mazda sedan he was working on, but it’s useless. I know that he’s going to come up, which only makes me more nervous, so by the time he strolls over to start talking to me, I’m so frazzled that I’ve dropped the gas tank cap under the car, so he of course has a view of my ass in the air when he walks over, arousing his caveman instincts to club me with his oil-soaked wrench and drag me back to his body shop.
“How you doin’ today, ma’am?” he asks, as I finally get back on my feet.
“Oh – I’m – I’m fine, thank you,” I say, still trying to get the pump into the gas tank, which I’m cursing for looking so suggestive.
“Got your little flower on.” He says this like a statement, and always makes a hand gesture where he wiggles his fingers, as though I was wearing a live roach on my blouse.
“Yeah,” I laugh nervously, and note that the gas is pumping roughly at the speed of molasses.
“How’s your little Saturn doin’?” he asks, and I can’t help but wonder if he’s not talking about the car.
“Oh, it’s fine…” I say, and my heart lifts when I see that my gas tank is almost full.
“Oh, well, that’s nice. Reaaaaal nice.” The pump clicks. He smiles at me. “Well, you have a good day, sweetheart.”
But I can’t hear him because I have already jumped into my car, and am frantically searching around for my keys.
I should just remember that Roy works at that particular gas station and not go, but I’m awful at remembering to get gas, so by the time I realize I need gas, my car is already sputtering death threats at me, and that station is about a block from my apartment.
God forbid any of my neighbors go to that gas station and see me. I’ve already ruined my reputation in the apartment building as a respectable individual when, in another display of crap-spatial reasoning, I got a chair stuck in the fire escape.
Mike-O and I were moving my favorite wing chair from Virginia Avenue over to the apartment, and being that we’re on the first floor, neither of us could foresee a problem with getting it into the door. We took it up the back steps so that we could park in the lot in the back, and things were going great until about the third step, where I made a faulty move, and suddenly, my chair was lodged between the bars of the stairs.
Mind you, there were only five steps.
We tried like hell to get it dislodged, and I swear to you, we must have been there for fifteen minutes trying to get it unstuck. Mike-O suggested that we break one of its legs, but I couldn’t bear to part with the chair that had been my mother’s when she first started out on her own. It was symbolic, dammit, and we were going to get it into the apartment in one piece.
I was feeling pretty good about it until I heard one of the neighbors coming down the fire escape. That’s when I panicked.
The poor girl came down, and gasped when she saw us, and my gigantic pink wing chair, lodged in the stairwell. I apologized profusely, and Mike-O hid behind the piece of furniture as best he could. I’m no good in situations like that. I panicked and told the neighbor that we were new at this whole moving thing, and it had been stuck for fifteen minutes, and please don’t call the landlord to have us evicted, etc.
The neighbor reached for the chair, and with one quick thrust to the left, got it easily unstuck. I don’t know what’s worse: having my chair stuck for all eternity, or having the neighbor upstairs thinking that I have the common sense and cool of a rabid wildebeest.
If nothing else, at least I don’t have to see my neighbor every day, or for extended periods of time. A quick humiliating smile in the parking lot is enough for me. Thank God my landlord cuts the grass, so she doesn’t have to see me work a lawn mower.
And thank God I don’t have to get gas for the lawn mower, either.
