by
Lucia Berlin
inspo/funny
Martin Amis,
Thomas Pynchon,
Charlie Kaufman,
Miranda July,
Helen DeWitt,
Lucia Berlin,
Iris Murdoch,
Shirley Hazzard,
Elaine Dundy
otherwise uncaptured moments of humor
Oh ho ho ho, Mrs. Robinson. He has over two thousand dollars’ worth of stereo equipment and five records. Simon and Garfunkel, Joni Mitchell, and three Beatles.
lmao
[...] I’d feed him Jell-O and listen to John read from Deuteronomy. I’ve never understood how so many barely literate people read the Bible so much. It’s hard. In the same way it surprises me that uneducated seamstresses all over the world can figure out how to put in sleeves and zippers.
502 was the clue for 1-Across in this morning’s Times. Easy. That’s the police code for Driving While Intoxicated, so I wrote in DWI. Wrong. I guess all those Connecticut commuters knew you were supposed to put in Roman numerals. I had a few moments of panic, as I always do when memories of my drinking days come up. But since I moved to Boulder I have learned to do deep breathing and meditation, which never fail to calm me.
I’m glad I got sober before I moved to Boulder. This is the first place I ever lived that didn’t have a liquor store on every corner. They don’t even sell alcohol in Safeway here and of course never on Sundays. They just have a few liquor stores mostly on the outskirts of town, so if you’re some poor wino with the shakes and it’s snowing, Lord have mercy. The liquor stores are gigantic Target-size nightmares. You could die from DTs just trying to find the Jim Beam aisle.
god this is funny
I stood holding the note with that funny little abandoned feeling one gets a million times a day in a domestic setting. I could have cried, but why? It’s not like I need to dish with my husband about every little thing; that’s what friends are for. Harris and I are more formal, like two diplomats who aren’t sure if the other one has poisoned our drink. Forever thirsty but forever wanting the other one to take the first sip.
Saturday. I got out of bed and looked at the calendar on my computer. (This is the kind of thing you can do easily if you don’t share a bed with your husband. He snores, I’m a light sleeper.) On Saturday at three o’clock Harris had driven Sam to a playdate, so at four I had been alone. That’s right—I had dutifully called my parents, but they weren’t home so I began texting friends in New York about my upcoming visit; I had just turned forty-five and this trip was my gift to myself. I was going to see plays and art and stay in a nice hotel instead of with friends, which normally would feel like a waste of money, but I’d gotten a surprise check—a whiskey company had licensed a sentence I’d written years ago for a new global print campaign. It was a sentence about hand jobs, but out of context it could also apply to whiskey. Twenty grand.
lol
He wasn’t as young as he looked, but he was younger than he thought he was. Thirty-one is young, I said. He winced like I was just being polite. He felt like a fuckup, like he should have done more by now. He’d wasted time on stupid shit. He was working overtime these days; he needed to save up twenty thousand dollars, a “nest egg,” and that would take years and years. I nodded, getting it. There was nothing on my person that revealed I’d just been paid twenty thousand dollars for one sentence about hand jobs.
“You recognized me,” I said tightly.
“Well, sure. I saw you talking to that guy at the gas station and thought I was going to have a heart attack. Then we had the thing when I cleaned your windshield.”
“But you couldn’t see me, the glare—”
“What are you talking about? We were looking right at each other.”
I felt like I was moving in slow motion, underwater.
“So when you came into that restaurant, Fontana’s—”
“I knew you’d be there. Because you’d asked the gas station guy where to eat.”
Not just a fan, a stalker.
“You really seemed like you didn’t remember seeing me,” I said evenly. “That was a good performance.”
“But I thought we both knew. We had had the crazy moment through the windshield, and now we were playing a kind of game. You asked me so many questions. And I kind of spilled the beans when I said I worked at Hertz.”
I didn’t see how that was spilling the beans.
“Oh my god,” he said, covering his mouth, “you’re so . . . You think everyone’s job is to clean your windshield.”
I shook my head. “No—you were cleaning another car, too.”
“A Hertz car. You do understand that I don’t work at a gas station?”
I turned red. There was a little vagueness around car-related jobs.
ahahaha
“Are you crying?”
I hadn’t even realized.
“Their plight is very moving to me,” I said, quickly pulling myself together. “A business . . . struggling to keep up with the technology . . . online booking.”
Harris, no idiot, didn’t say anything to that. I let out a sigh and shut my eyes.
“I’m just wiped out from my drive. Exhausted.”
“Sometimes it’s hard to come back,” he said slowly. “Really hard.”
Did he know? On some level? Maybe he did. Maybe he was about to confess something and then I would confess and this would be the start of us finally breaking through. Unfortunate timing, since I wasn’t in the mood to break through right now. But I might feel differently in the moment, the way people who suddenly accept Jesus Christ into their heart were like, Jesus who? just seconds before being born again. I sat up, bracing myself. He was finding the words.
“When I get home from Olympic”—Olympic was a recording studio in London—“it always takes me a couple days to readjust.”
“Yeah,” I said, waiting for the confession.
“To get back into the swing of things.”
“Right.”
“But then I do.”
Oh. No confession. He was saying there were limits to how long one could mope around and apparently he did it the right amount.
:(
“Are you a cinephile?” I ask, suddenly impressed with this withered, white papery Jew (?) before me.
“If by cinephile you mean someone sexually excited by film or film stock, then yes.”
“I didn’t mean that. I meant a lover of the art of film.”
“I am that as—”
“In the platonic sense, I mean.”
“Oh. I am that as well. Some films I love as friends, some in a deeper way.”
this makes me laugh out loud
Ingo doesn’t respond but simply limps to a notepad on the cluttered kitchen table and begins to write. I scan the room, hoping for elucidation. Boxes. Perhaps hundreds of them, maybe thousands, possibly millions—all marked: Automobiles, Firemen, Weather, Natives, Pastries, Trees (Palm, Spruce)…
Ingo returns with his list: Whole Milk, Whole Chicken, Whole Wheat Bread, Hole Puncher, Peach Halves (in syrup), Halvah, Half and Half, Anne Hathaway Havoc DVD, Black Thread, Black-eyed Peas, Ketchup, Mucilage, Carrots, Peanut Butter (chunkless), 150 packages of Ramen (assorted), 50 cans of Neelon’s Tuna Fish (improved texture), 80 cans of Nimby’s Chicken Noodle Soup, 10 pounds of Bolton’s Powdered Eggs, 5 pounds of Fripp’s Powdered Milk, 1 pound of Prochnow’s Powder (talcum), a thousand boxes (empty).
god he's so funny