A story of bladders, pee, and an errant strawberry

Last week, I had surgery on my innards! Most specifically on an organ that I shall call my blah-dére. Which had gone askew, drifted free of its moorings, and was eventually (maybe when I hit the age of 90) going to lead me into the Depends aisle if the doctor didn’t fix it. Three eight-pound babies sitting atop it might have caused it to slip from its accustomed position and go on a strange peregrination, saying hello to the colon and sidling up to the spleen. (The blah-dére is a known sidler, and should be given Tic-Tacs to carry.) It was on its way somewhere. It needed to be harnessed.

Organs that wander need stern discipline. I was embarrassed about this business, because blah-déres ain't the stuff of polite society, but now I'm posting it on my blog. Go figure. (People would rather talk about butts or boobs or even colons.)  But suppose your heart wandered, or your duodenum? Or your liver just up and hid somewhere in the cavity of your chest, cringing from your nightly devotionals to the Lords of Booze? You wouldn't put up with it, not for a minute.

I was not interested in shopping for “Poise” brand products (although I hear they make a fine and worthy product). Neither should you be, one in three like me! Go to the hospital and get that sonofabitch hoisted back on deck like a drunken sailor. Ashamed? Pfah! It’s more embarrassing to tinkle while doing jumping jacks or while doing ballet leaps to “Moves Like Jagger.” I’m going to become one of those “hot trampoline girls” now. Not a droplet of pee shall 'scape my nethers. I'm going to drink lots and lots of iced tea and beer and then go on the trampoline. 

I share this hideously embarrassing story so that others may seek the same path as I have. Because I'm cool like that. Although Whoopi, the spokeswoman for Poise, is very righteous for speaking about her "spritz" in a public forum, I don't like the thought of her wearing a "pad." I can't even say "pad" without using quote marks because it's such a horrible word, rather like "panty." Do we like "pads" for our periods? The last time I wore a blasted "pad" was after birthing my third child, and it was like wearing a couch cushion between my legs. No grown woman ought to submit to this injustice! (There is a school of thought, by the way, that suggests that wearing diapers is insulting and wrongful for babies. No baby ought to submit to this injustice!)

Blah-dére surgery is covered by insurance, although you will need to check with your own health care provider.

Whilst in hospital, I had the delight of sharing my room with an 87-year-old Italian lady named Philomena. She’d had surgery on her back that morning. As I was eating my “clear” dinner of chicken broth and lime jello (my second such miserable meal of the day), I could smell her dinner of chicken breast with gravy and mashed potatoes from the other side of the curtain.

“I no eat!” said Philomena. Those were about her only words of English.

As soon as her extended family left the premises, she began moaning and groaning like the star of a tragic opera.

“Oh, mamma mia! Lo sono nel dolore terribile!” she cried. I could hear her writhing about, chewing on the scenery a bit for good measure. "Come ho fatto a finire que? Non mi piace questo posto!"

Then she started to gawp up great gobs of phlegm and then swallow ‘em down again. She did this all evening long. It sounded something like this:

“Schllurfkgkgkk…gulp. SHNMMJKKlllffp…gulp.”

After each series of wrenching, barftastic noises, she started to call out for me.

“Miss. Missuz! Missiz! Heeeeelp me! Heeeelp me! Aiuto!”

I could tell the poor old dear was in pain so I’d ring the nurse on her behalf. The nurse would come running in with a Percocet for me.

“No, not me! Her!”

“But we can’t understand a word of Italian!” said all the nurses.

“Um, I think she is in PAIN. Show her the sad-face pain chart,” I suggested.

They rolled old Philomena around on the bed and asked her lots of questions and she babbled at them in Italian. I think they may have given her a Tylenol, but nothing stronger—for she never went to sleep!

After the third incident I accepted the Percocet for myself, and drifted off into a blissful slumber. An hour or so passed, and then:

“Miss! Missuz! Oh, Missuz! Heeeeeelp me! Snlurklegurklrsmskfkg….gulp.”

I rang the nurse and told her I needed another Percocet. She asked where the pain was.

“In my head!” I said.

Finally, morning came. Philomena was moaning and thrashing about in a frenzy. I called the nurse again.

“You gotta help this lady!” I said.

Finally, they gave her a Percocet while she was in the midst of poking at her breakfast, which included a fruit salad.

It wasn’t long before she zonked out, and I was finally able to read my book without disruption. But soon, Philomena’s daughter showed up.

“Mamma!” she said. “Mamma! Wake up! Open your eyes, Mamma! What’s a-wrong with you, Mamma? Mamma!”

The daughter started slapping and tugging at the mother, and crying out for the nurses. Oh Lord, I thought, what if the old lady corked off?

Then the daughter screamed: “Oh Mamma mia! She got a strawberry inside her mouth! She’s a-gonna choke! You kill-a my mamma!”

There was much activity to remove the strawberry while the daughter wailed things like, “You drug-a my mother! You drug-a her and feed her strawberry! Questo e molto male!”

The strawberry was finally extracted and Philomena gave a gentle snort of pleasure, lost in her Percocet-induced dream. I wondered what she’d been like in her youth, and decided that she probably screamed and carried on just as wildly when, as a girl, a boy dropped a newt down her shirt. No, she’d lost none of her spunk. Hopefully not any of her spritz, either. Bring out a trampoline for Philomena, for she wishes to bounce as high as the darkening sky.

I Shall Never Live With a Female Again: Part Two

Wrench not pictured.

The Prozac Jitters
 
I had worked at the same company with S about a year when we decided to live together. She seemed a nice enough person, with a good sense of humor.

     She had been engaged, but the fiance had inexplicably moved out one day and canceled the wedding plans. She was distraught and, paying too much rent for a Brooklyn floor-through, wanted something more economical. I sympathized with her over the disappearance of the boyfriend. 
     "How could he abandon you like that?" I asked, indignant. It seemed capricious and cruel; later, I thought it showed a discerning nature and more than a lick of sense. He had legged it, and fast. When he broke up with her, S had idly threatened to stab him with a kitchen knife. 

     When S left her old apartment, I took the opportunity to let an apartment-hunting couple of mine know about it. They visited, approved, and agreed to take it. After S arrived with bags and boxes to our new apartment, she asked if I would accompany her back to her old place to "pick up a few things,"  such as her bedding, and a few pairs of shoes. Odd that she left them out of the moving truck, I thought, but agreed to help. When we arrived, I received my first harbinger of doom. S waded right into the apartment, through piles of wrinkled clothing, bags of half-eaten potato chips, cat toys, sponges, utensils, and sacks of garbage. I stood there, appalled, as she scooped up a few pairs of shoes. A couple of them spilled out of her arms as she shuffled back toward the door.

     S, you see, was the kind of girl who always appeared impeccably dressed, ironed, and accessorized. I had never had a hint of the chaos under the veneer.

     "Things got out of control while I was packing," she confessed. Very well. I had visited her in the apartment a few months before, but remembered nothing like this. Perhaps it was just an aberration.

     She gathered up whatever she could carry and gave me the garbage bucket and a mop to tote back to the new apartment. They looked suspiciously unused.

     "I guess you're going to come back and clean up this stuff?" I ventured.

     "Not at all." she replied. "The landlord will take care of it."

     A few days later, I received a phone call from my friends who had moved in. The apartment was supposed to have been left "broom clean." They had spent a full day, along with the landlord, toting sacks of discarded possessions and rotten food to the street. The refrigerator was filled with half-eaten bags of stale Cheese Doodles. Not only that, but S had left two big cardboard boxes stuffed full of her personal diaries. My friends were kind enough to hang onto them. (About two years later, when S still had not made a move to reclaim them, my friends cracked a couple and read a couple of tiresome, whiny entries. They were then chucked unceremoniously in the trash.)

     S, however, had brought plenty to our new apartment. Three cats, with all their accessories, moved right in. The place was lousy with cats. Her former fiance, a poet, had abandoned a full library of books in his haste to escape her. About 30 boxes of them sat in our living room. And her clothes collection was astounding. It came in big black garbage bags, on clothing racks, on hangers stuffed into boxes. Everything was impossibly wrinkled and, I soon discovered, would be summarily dry cleaned--at what enormous cost I can't fathom.

     After a couple of weeks in the new apartment, S still had not made a single effort to put away any of her belongings. They filled the common rooms from floor to ceiling, spilled out into the hallways, glutted the exits. The whole place was one goddamn fire trap. Over the piles, the three cats prowled about, yowling and urinating wantonly.

     Enraged, I demanded that S raise herself off the couch and do some work. She would tote a load of clothes up to her lair, then collapse on the sofa and smoke languidly, watching me under half-lidded eyes as I strained with more of the load.  After about 3 months of steady work, all the materials were contained. Her own room was a study in chaos: great, black garbage bags of clothes were piled around her bed like a barricade, and the clothing racks sagged under the weight. S had become so enslaved by fashion that it had literally imprisoned her; she lay in there like some troglodyte harpy, cawing out demands and complaints. She was so doped up on Prozac and other unidentified substances that she never got out of bed before 11 a.m.--especially on work days. Around her bed, an alarming supply of prescription bottles lay opened and half-spilled, presumably so she could snack on them in the night. I also noticed what I thought was a crusty old vibrator lying amongst the detritus, but I won't speak of that.

     Sometime early in our relationship, we acquired a third roommate. G moved in , full of good will. During his first week, one of the wretched cats urinated on his new leather jacket, which he had been unfortunate enough to leave on his floor.

     Despite the enormous number of feline presences in the home, S cleaned their litter box sporadically, at best. The cats rebelled. Occasionally, we would find little cat doody surprises on the kitchen floor. G and I made a pact--we would not clean the things up, no matter how terrible, because it would set a bad precedent. As a result, sometimes the poo would remain on the linoleum until it encrusted into a kind of awful museum piece. When we tactlessly mentioned the "little accidents," S would mutter and growl under her breath.

     S spent most of her evenings sprawled on the couch, a cigarette in her lips, the remote in hand. I seemed destined for weak-willed, pasty roommates with no hope of social life. A nimbus of cigarette ash and food products formed on the carpet--my carpet--under her head; the stain is there still. When I returned home from a night out with friends, S would fix a lazy, lizardlike eye on me from her recumbent position. The effect was downright creepy.

     Pretty soon, we began to notice that a pervasive odor of cat urine was infecting the entire place. The cats seemed to favor a dank, brown rug that had been laid down over the stairs and in the front hall sometime in the 1960s. One afternoon, G. and I tore up the entire carpet, picking out nails with a pair of pliers, and hoisted the sodden mass outdoors. The wood floor that was revealed was in decent shape. During our labors, S returned home, and fell into a foul humor as we had not asked her "permission" before the undertaking.

     Money also became an issue. S and I had initially agreed to share the grocery shopping. This changed after I got wise to her little scheme. At the store, she always seemed to have an empty wallet. I was constantly asking her to reimburse me for food, cleaning supplies, and other household necessities. So jittery with Prozac that she could barely write, S would grudgingly pen a check after some weeks of requests.

     During this time, she was set up by a sympathetic coworker on a blind date. On only their second time out, her purse was stolen. The date, acting as a gentleman, offered her his credit card until she could get her cards replaced. During the next few weeks, S engaged in a maniacal spending frenzy. She returned home with pairs of new shoes to add to her growing pile, and wallets stuffed full of cash-advance money--none of which, I noticed sourly, went to repay me for all her past debts. After at least $1,000 of madcap spending, S went to the bank machine and discovered she had maxed out the poor fellow's card. She explained to us, without a trace of remorse, that as his mother had recently died, he had a number of expenses on the card for the funeral and the gravestone. She seemed slightly put out that her ready cash flow had dried up. By this time, the poor man was so repulsed by her that he insisted she get out of his life--and forget about the money.

     For some time, S had taken to applying her makeup and dressing in my room after I left for work in the mornings. Her room was such a disaster that such actions were impossible. Although I kept my door bolted shut to keep the infernal cats out, S would often forget and leave it open behind her. After a weekend away, I returned home and headed for my room. Something was wrong. Terribly wrong. I patted the bed, and realized that it was a sea of cat piss--soaked through right down to the mattress. G returned home to find the sheets, featherbed, and blankets cascading down the stairs, while my tortured screams echoed through the house. To add fuel to my fire, I discovered that S had eaten a large portion of my prescription allergy medication. She must die.

     S, when confronted, suggested that perhaps the cats were angry because I had abandoned them for the weekend. She also recommended that I kept my door locked. With that, she slouched out of the room, forgetting to offer to clean my bedding. I did eventually wrench a check out of her to pay for the exorbitant cost of cleaning the featherbed (no dry cleaner within a 50-mile radius would touch it), but the situation led to the final dissolution of our friendship, as it were. After accusing G and I of a cruel collusion against her and the cats, she elected to move out. I made myself scarce while she packed. Afterward, G and I cleaned every trace of her foul presence from the apartment. I noticed that the little toad had somehow managed to pack all my music notebooks and my entire box of tools--two things which she would never use in her lifetime. She claimed she didn't have them, but I think the real reason is that she never unpacked at her new apartment. I can picture her there now, surrounded by cardboard boxes and piles of faeces.

     After she was gone, we did find one more memento of S: we made an odd discovery of a collection of giant x-rays of her skull and pelvis, stuffed behind the couch. Sadly, there was no silhouette of a metal wrench to be found that might explain the mystery of her troubled nature. Somewhat terrified, we pried up the cheap wooden boards in the dining room wall and hid the x-rays there, where they will no doubt be found by some future archaeologist.  

I Shall Never Live With a Female Again: Part One

I found this story in my files today, embedded a very ancient document with a barely recognizable Microsoft Word icon that was last seen circa 1995. I now bring its (unedited) crumbling treasures to light in a scandalous new series entitled I Shall Never Live With a Female Again.

Part One:  Screams, Embezzlement, and Cheap Red Wine

My second roommate was a sullen, drunken girl with a face as big as a pumpkin. She insisted on wearing leather pants, at least two sizes too small, and they tugged at the crotch in an unflattering manner. I once caught her with my electric toothbrush in hand, trying to apply it in an unkind fashion to her cat's anus--out of some spite for me, and not the hapless cat. I did not like her.

Poor little innocent mite!

     We lived in Stuyvesant Town, a housing development in New York built in the 1940s by the MetLife company. Stretching from 14th Street to 20th, and east of 1st avenue, a series of dull, 20-story brick buildings extend toward the river. Carefully tended and fenced plots of grass, amid circuitous pathways, lends the whole place a parklike air. Walking on the grass is unacceptable. The best thing about Stuy Town is the cheap, decently large apartments.

     The roommate, Jessica (not her real name), had lived in this depressing joint since a skinny brat of 13. She had inherited the apartment from her mother and to her, it was home. There she had lived and swollen in the dark for many a year, nursing her own brand of poisonous hatred. When we met, she had reached a nadir of fat and bitterness.

     She seemed fine at first glance--as all the evil ones generally do. Personable, funny, even charming. I imagined we would become great friends. She asked if I liked cats. I replied that I did. We laughed a bit over this and that. This was, in sum, the extent of our interview. Feckless naivete! Rule One of roommate relations: don't move in with a female. Ever.

     I moved into the smaller of the two rooms in the apartment with new hope for the future. It was a narrow little cave, but I thought I could make something of it. The rent was $600--half of the total for the apartment, although Jessica's room was easily three times the size of mine. 

     I lacked a bed, but the former roommate had left a thin futon behind, along with a cracked wooden frame, broken during an athletic sexual session. Necessity forced me to claim it. The futon mattress was so thin that I felt every gap and grain in the wood beneath. Perhaps this nasty pallet exacerbated my ill humor.

     The first signs of trouble came quickly. It was near Christmas, and Jessica indulged in the commercial aspects of that holiday with a sickening fervor. She purchased a tree, brewed vats of mulled wine, and bedizened the apartment with Santa icons. In addition, the perky and infuriating song "Santa Baby" warbled through the apartment incessantly.

     Her tree-trimming party eased my qualms somewhat; her friends seemed pleasant enough. Jessica's boyfriend was a nice enough guy, even though he had chunks of plaster and grit in his hair from his construction job. But at the night's end, Jessica retired, with the boyfriend, to her bedroom at the end of the hall. A friend and I sat talking under the blinking Christmas lights. Without warning, we heard an unearthly caterwauling coming from Jessica's bedroom. Her screams were so vivid, punctuated with grunting, throaty gasps, that we were forced to raise our voices to match the noise. The shrieks grew louder, more forced. The din was almost unnatural. We fled the apartment, the sounds of Jessica's monstrous cries following us down the hall. Stuy Town, I learned, was not known for soundproof walls.

     Pretty soon the undernourished and perenially filthy boyfriend got wise and slipped away. Jessica responded by slugging back big shots of Vodka and passing out on the rug repeatedly. "He's a rat bastard, but I love 'im!" she wept.

     The daily routine was quite grim. Jessica lost her job not many months after I had moved in. The real reason was unclear, but she said that they had falsely accused her of dishonesty. I was suspicious. After applying for unemployment, she spent her days lounging on the sofa in a tattered terrycloth robe, spearing cold Chinese food out of the carton and swilling cheap red wine. It was not a pretty, welcoming sight. At night, she ventured out in search of booze and unwary boys. Occasionally, she would drag some hapless post-adolescent back to the apartment, and repeat the faux-orgasmic routine on into the night. The men she found were predictably runty, unshaven types.

     Things got progressively more gruesome. Jessica took up an aerobics routine in the living room, and sweated and slogged back and forth to some Jane Fonda workout. After about 15 minutes of this dreary exercise, she collapsed on the floor and lit a cigarette. When she wasn't out on the prowl, she spent the evenings hunched in front of the television set. More and more, I retired to my room to escape her drunken rantings and tearful remembrances of her unduly hairy ex-boyfriend. When Jessica wasn't pie-eyed, she was darkly, dismally hungover.

     Normally, such a depressing lifestyle would inspire pity. But Jessica was so surly and resentful that my dislike for her blossomed every day. She clearly hated everything about me. When I had friends over, she would march into the living room and turn on the television at full blast, driving us out into the night to get away from her depressing influence. She also employed musical torture, blasting Alanis Morrissette's "You Oughta Know" all night, until the thin walls shook.

     For some time, I had wondered how Jessica managed to survive, month after month, on only her unemployment checks. She had enough for the rent, I was sure, but her feeding and boozing habits had to cost something. Every month, I wrote her a rent check, which she then combined with her own and passed on to the Stuy Town administration. The reason for this was that her name was on the lease, not mine. I suspected that Stuy Town didn't look kindly on sublets and roommates, but said nothing. I was glad to have a place to live.

     One day I noticed that she'd left her rent check out on the table. The amount: $924. How strange, I thought, when my share of that was $600. Jessica's enormous room amounted to $324 per month. I decided to beard the gargoyle in her den.

     Jessica quickly fashioned a lie about overpaying the rent for the previous month, "by accident." What kind of fool overpays her rent by accident? She turned ugly when pressed.

     "It's none of your goddamn business," was her final, guttural statement.

     I didn't like this one bit, but Jessica had a gleam in her eyes that suggested she might have dark thoughts in mind. Best not to press an enraged sloth such as she. I decided to do a bit of amateur detective work, and found the apartment lease amongst her piles of foul plus-sized clothing. Indeed, the total rent for the apartment was $924--rent stabilized. The lease also clearly stated that extra tenants were forbidden. I kept the information to myself.

     After a few more unpleasant months had passed, I was leaving the apartment one morning and made a startling discovery. Jessica still lay tangled in her sheets, hungover and bloated, as she did most mornings. There, under the door, was an eviction notice. It insisted, in rather forceful terms, that Jessica report to court, as this was her third eviction notice, and eviction would come sooner rather than later. The cause of eviction? Non-payment of rent. Where, then, were my rent checks? Clearly, they had gone to feed Jessica's unwholesome appetites. And I was about to be evicted into the cold, New York winter.

     After another quick search, I located the other two eviction notices, carelessly tossed on her desk. I knew that eviction didn't happen overnight, but apparently, this situation was about to approach its unholy climax. Action must be taken, and quickly.

     I broached the matter delicately with Jessica, who flew into an unsightly rage. Again, I was informed that the matter was "none of my business."

     "I beg to differ," I suggested, but she told me I was unused to the ways of the world--a country bumpkin who had to learn a thing or two.

     "This is New York, honey," she snarled. "Get used to it."

     She then informed me that she had two other tenants ready to move in, and that I should get out as soon as possible.

     "You're going to stiff two more fools out of their money?" I asked. "How much will you charge them?"

     "It's none of your business!" she screamed again.

     I decided it was best to let the matter lie, as I had to leave for Christmas vacation in a couple of days, and I didn't want all my possessions destroyed while I was away. This girl was dangerous. I told her that we'd work it all out in some mutually pleasing way. She calmed down, and I planned my escape.

     After vacation, I arranged for my brother to arrive with a truck, and loaded up everything I owned while Jessica lay struck by another hangover. She didn't even hear me leave.

     As we loaded up the truck, one of Stuy Town's ubiquitous security vehicles pulled up, and the driver got out and asked what I was up to. I told him the whole sorry tale. "You're glad you got out," he said. "That tenant owes more than 5 grand in back rent. We've been trying to get her out forever. Eviction should happen any day now."

     After I left, I heard from several friends who had called, looking for me, that Jessica had shouted at them and told them if she ever called them again, she'd set the cops on them. "This is harassment!" she would scream, before slamming down the phone. I never learned what happened to her, but I did call several months later just to see if she was still living there. An angry male answered and told me he'd never heard of Jessica, and that he didn't want to be bothered again. The alarming reality: she's loose somewhere out there.