The Potty Mouth at the Table Read online

  Would I sell my Mucha for half a million dollars? Absolutely. Did I want to? No.

  So when Ariane called me the next day and told me not to look at the Sunday newspaper, I nodded and went ahead and did it.

  “Eugene Show Stop Uncovers Rich Find,” the headline read, and went on to report that a lost Norman Rockwell painting had been discovered at the fairgrounds the day before on Antiques Roadshow. Worth half a million dollars.

  I saw it hanging at the museum the next time I was there, and the security guard standing next to the painting pointed to me and said, “Can you believe it? Antiques Roadshow!”

  Either way, win or lose, you give up something.

  Several months later, I found a new listing on Google for the Mucha Foundation. After I heard the tinkling of the theme song for Antiques Roadshow on the television, I thought I’d show them what for and e-mailed Marcus Mucha, the artist’s grandson, with a letter and some pictures.

  It was, he assured me, going to hang on my wall forever.

  It was a fake.

  Initially, I didn’t believe it and stuck to my guns that the poster was such a unique piece that even the Mucha Foundation had no idea about it. In a way, a small part of me still believes that, although a larger part of me is delighted that when it’s my husband’s turn to pick out a TV show during our joint quality time, I have something better to look at than Battlestar Galactica.

  At least the bong was a bust, too—I don’t think it would have been worth anything unless it could have been DNA-traced to Ronald Reagan; the frog, however, was worth fifteen hundred dollars. Supposedly.

  Doesn’t matter. Right now, I’m waiting for a day in May when I find out whether I got tickets to Antiques Roadshow in Seattle.

  I wonder what twelve new old stock antique mugs are worth.

  THAT DAMN HOBO

  Holy shit, there’s a body in there!” my husband said as he looked at me with wide eyes and backed away from the bushes he had been poking at a moment ago.

  I shook my head, closed my eyes, and yelled loud enough for all of our neighbors to hear: “You know what? I hate the yoga people! I hate them! This is all their fault!”

  I was enraged. It was all their fault. There happened to be a yoga studio situated behind our house, and apparently, the hedges that lined the back portion of my yard and my neighbors’ became something of an inconvenience to the people who decided to start using our alley as a shortcut into the yoga parking lot. And I was certain to a reasonably certain degree that some aloof and flexible jerkess who could dial an iPhone with a pedicured pinky toe from wheel pose had reported everyone on my side of the street to the city, because we all received warning letters of complaint. And they wanted the problem addressed.

  Our slightly unruly hedges became such a problem for these uptight ladies, who really should just stay home and take Ativan instead of bringing their toxic energy to my street, that I came home one day to find large pink signs staked in the front yards of the neighbors on either side of me. The signs declared their property was a “public nuisance”—which is ridiculous, because either of these homes could be used as a movie set, they were so well tended. I don’t know how I escaped the public staking, but I couldn’t help feeling a little left out.

  If the bushes were a little overgrown and a branch had the yearning to reach out and scratch a Range Rover driven by a woman in a tank top and jeggings, I didn’t know, but I sure would’ve laughed if I’d seen it with my own eyes. The alley is not someplace that we wander freely, mainly because it is not territory that belongs to us. It is hobo turf, and as someone who’d rather not have to get a gun safe and stock up on rounds, I’d rather not go out there. Once you step past the back gate and into the hinterlands, it’s like stepping into Narnia, but one that smells like urine and constantly has the clanging of glass bottles knocking together as they jostle about in a freshly stolen Safeway shopping cart, which I have since learned is the native call of the hobo.

  I’d like to mention here that some people have insisted to me that “hobo” is an impolite term, and that I should use something a little more politically correct, like “residentially challenged” or “free-range tenant.” But frankly, I don’t see a problem with the word “hobo,” nor do I understand why some people believe it to be derogatory. I believe “hobo” to have a genteel, jaunty connotation to it; I believe it to be a jocular reference to someone who might have fallen on hard times but is making the very best go of it.

  Hobos like Tom Joad, they ride the rails, eat beans out of a can like I did in my early twenties. Hobos are friends with Woody Guthrie. Hobos carve tiny secret messages for other hobos on fence posts along the road. If I had my druthers, I would much prefer to picture my hobo humming to himself, happy all the time, carrying around his stuff in a bandana on a stick and taking a sip from a flask every now and then, than to open my eyes to the fact that a residentially challenged squatter is shooting up methamphetamine in between his toes roughly thirty feet from my back door.

  All of the neighbors knew we had something of a diverse population in our alley due to our proximity to downtown and to a Safeway, a hub for cashing in bottles and cans for five cents apiece. Due to their serve-yourself soup bar, Safeway also became the hobo restaurant of choice, and that was evident by the number of folks with bits of grass stuck to the backs of their flannel shirts gulping down cups of minestrone under the cover of Pepperidge Farm end caps. As a result, I will eat foodstuffs shipped directly from China before I eat anything from that store that hasn’t been hermetically sealed by a machine—and that’s not elitist. That’s just called being averse to open sores on or about the mouth area. I don’t have them now. I don’t want them later because I defied the odds and carelessly dove into a vat of Tuscan Tomato Herpes Bisque.

  Still, eat your soup, rummage through my garbage, use my alley as a hobo highway; I didn’t particularly care. You’re a hobo. Even the day that I went searching in the back hedge for my dog’s ball and found something quite different didn’t really upset me all that much. There, tucked into an open space in between branches, was basically a hobo RV—a piece of cardboard, a Little Caesars pizza box, and a bag of empty soda cans that were undoubtedly headed for return at Safeway, followed by a bacchanalian chicken noodle feast.

  You know what I did? Nothing. I left the stuff there. I figured that if the hobo needed a place to store his stuff, I was okay with it. However, I did feel a bit unsettled after I informed my neighbors of the discovery and learned that one of them had found used hypodermic needles in her kid’s playhouse, and the other had suspicions that the temporary required-by-construction port-o-potty in her backyard might have been an attraction of sorts.

  But I still let my hobo use my bushes as a master bedroom closet.

  Then came the day a year later when I noticed something odd in my garlic bed. There were “deposits” in uncouth places. True, I have a little dog. She is a very weird, particular sort of creature that has meticulous habits, and that includes where she conducts private time. To tell the truth, she takes her private time so seriously that I have no idea where she goes unless we’re on a walk, and then she’ll go in front of people who are standing in their front yard. I know she wasn’t the one who made dirty in the garlic bed. In a self-defense mechanism, I cleaned up the deposits and convinced myself that my dog was simply acting out of character, even though I found the curiosities in the exact spot where a full-size human would squat over the garden border.

  My neighbor’s port-o-potty, by the way, had been removed when construction on her house had been completed a month before. Regardless, I put a lock on the back gate and I moved on.

  The following week, after seven days of rain and freezing temperatures, I discovered a structure of sorts under my back gate, bridging the muddy span between the alley and the backyard for easy, unencumbered passage, consisting of boards probably ripped off my neighbor’s fence. It was work unfettered by details and constructed by someone who subsisted on a s
trict diet of soup. I looked at my dog. I knew she didn’t build it. Her eyes told me she wasn’t the garlic pooper, either.

  The week after that, my little dog woke me up at 6:30 a.m. to alert me that something was amiss at our front door. After I stumbled down the stairs, I found a man I had never seen before standing in front of my neighbor’s house, who turned and ambled across the street with the speed of a threatened silverback as soon as I opened the door. Within three seconds, he was quickly on my porch as clouds of frost shot out of his mouth and he waved his arms boldly about.

  “I need gas!” he demanded, his eyes bulging. “I need lawn mower gas right now! How much do you have? I’m going to the Four Corners!”

  “We don’t have a lawn mower!” I replied quickly, which was equally insane because he should have known that. There was no doubt in my mind that he’d been in our backyard. Plus, a hobo doesn’t go very far without his stuff, maybe a block or two, so that meant that his base camp was nearby. Very nearby.

  Aside from that, I would never give a hobo gas, even if I did want him to relocate to another state. In Phoenix, a hobo arsonist tried to set our backyard on fire in the middle of the night and there I was when the fire department arrived, holding a hose and wearing just a tank top and a pair of Fruit of the Loom white cotton briefs. You only need to make that mistake once.

  I shut the door quickly and couldn’t help being disappointed. He didn’t have a bandana on a stick, he wasn’t humming, and he did not seem jolly in the least. My hobo was mean. And high. He was just a crackhead, one who’d become unaccustomed to using toilet paper and really would drive a lawn mower to the border of Arizona and Utah if the voices demanded it.

  That was the last time I encountered the hobo or any sign of him, except when I saw him at Safeway several months later, pushing a stolen grocery cart full of stuff, including a lampshade I thought I could really do something with. Clearly, his dreams of reaching the Four Corners on a lawn mower had not been realized, and he had replaced that reverie with spitting at traffic instead.

  Then the complaint letter arrived, giving us ten days to maintain the bushes in the alley or face a fine from the city. We bought a pole trimmer, unlocked the back gate, noticed the bridge was gone—clearly if you lock out a hobo, he takes back his gifts—and crossed the border into hobo Narnia.

  We were halfway done when my husband shut off the trimmer.

  “What’s in there?” he asked, pointing hesitantly to the portion of the bushes he had just cut.

  There was a large mass of something blue, several bags of empty soda cans, and a pair of jeans.

  “That’s the hobo’s apartment,” I said nervously, shooting a glance down the alley in case he was on his way home, even though I knew I’d hear the clatter of beer bottles long before he rounded the corner and the spitting started.

  “There’s something in there,” my husband said, leaning in closer. “Holy shit! There’s a body in there!”

  Now, I suppose it would be different if this were the first body my husband had suddenly found this year, but it wasn’t (although I’m not allowed to write about it because it’s “still not funny, Laurie”; I just checked). The thought of a deceased free-range hobo filled me with dread, fear, and, most of all, anger. I couldn’t believe this was about to happen again. After the last body (still not funny; I checked again) it took two weeks of watching the entire catalog of Pixar movies and eating Domino’s Pizza every night before my husband had calmed down enough to resist poking me every time I closed my eyes.

  This was really unfair. I didn’t want him to go through the trauma of finding a second dead person within a square mile, and personally, I can only watch Cars 2 once a year. If the yoga people didn’t insist on using the alley as their own personal street and then feel they had the right to complain to the city that our bushes were scratching their cars, we wouldn’t be back here in the first place. The last thing I ever want to do on any day is find a dead hobo, because once you discover one, you can’t undiscover it.

  I felt terrible that I did not give him gas that day. And I’m sorry he died alone. But at least he made it back to his apartment. Clearly, he went peacefully in the comfort of his own nest, resting on a bed of leaves and surrounded by the roughly thirty-eight balls he had likely stolen from my dog.

  I obviously couldn’t live with the thought of a dying hobo haunting my backyard. I had predecided the minute I spotted him lying there that our house would be up for sale by sundown.

  My anger turned to rage when I heard the crunch of gravel under tires and I knew there was a yoga person turning into the parking lot. I wouldn’t be out here if it weren’t for them and their complaining. If it weren’t for them, the hobo could have been found by a subsequent homeowner who thought that grooming the back of his house was just as important as grooming the front, or by some little kids poking around in places they shouldn’t have been poking.

  “You know what?” I yelled loud enough for all of our neighbors to hear me. “I hate the yoga people! I hate them! This is all their fault!”

  “I agree. I hate them, too. Now help me,” my husband said as he reached toward the mound, and with gloved hands, we each pulled the bundle of blue out. It wasn’t heavy, but then again, it’s not like you can’t stick a mummy in a backpack and hike out of a tomb with it.

  I shuddered. The wave of anxiety swallowing my insides grew larger when we pulled what turned out to be a filthy blue comforter out of the bushes. Under it, I saw the outline of a body on its side, bent at the knees and one arm under the head.

  I took a deep breath. “How do we do this?” I asked my husband, since he was the one with the experience. We pulled the comforter back at the same time, expecting to see our hobo, now done in leather.

  But there was nothing. Just leaves. Lots of leaves and dirt. The comforter was empty. No body. No dead hobo. No Ratatouille and a large Meat Lovers on the menu for tonight. The tragedy that was getting ready to swallow our lives or at least the rest of the afternoon had been undone.

  The hobo lived. Probably, maybe. Well, perhaps the hobo lived, and that was good enough for me as long as he wasn’t dead within my property lines.

  We simply looked at each other as we dropped our respective corners and exhaled huge sighs of relief. From behind me, I heard another set of tires on gravel, then a short honk of a car horn. I turned to see a Volvo, a nice, new, shiny Volvo, stopped and waiting for us to get out of the way. I waved slightly, and as the driver drove slowly past toward the parking lot of the yoga studio, she waved back.

  “Sor-ree!” She grinned with a huge white smile. “I need to get to class.”

  “No problem,” I said as I smiled back. “We were completely and utterly in your way as a driver who has co-opted our alley.”

  “Is that your house right there?” the yoga person said as she pointed to my backyard, and I got ready for a lecture about how errant laurel branches can decimate the Blue Book value of a Volvo that she just drove off a car lot yesterday.

  “Yep,” I said, getting my pointer finger ready for an alley screaming match. It was all about to go down, hobo style.

  “I don’t want you to think that I’m spying,” she said with a laugh, which disarmed me. “But as I drive by I can see your yard through the bushes, and your garden looks so beautiful. Everything is so green and healthy!”

  “Well, I wouldn’t say it was organic, but we did have a special kind of fertilizer,” I said as I smiled back, then quickly added, “Hey! Would you like some homegrown garlic?”

  THE POTTY MOUTH AT THE TABLE

  I couldn’t believe it. I had just been bitch slapped.

  I sat there stunned for seconds afterward in the eerie quiet that followed. I looked out at the lecture hall filled with students as sixty pairs of eyes turned toward me, the silence invading the room like barefooted Huns. As soon as I recovered my senses, I looked down the table of panelists and at the tiny man in the stupid fedora who had just insulted me publicly and co
ntinued right on with his nasal diatribe.

  I had never met this man before; our first meeting had been fifteen minutes earlier when we were introduced by the moderator of a writing panel, Humor in Literature. We’d both been invited to speak at this writing conference, and while I am not a scholar of poetry, I am a pretty good judge of character when it comes to tiny, assholian men who fancy fedora hats. And when I read his bio in the conference booklet—all instructors were asked to write their own bios—my suspicions were confirmed. He wrote that he considered himself to be one of the most admired, acknowledged, and humorous poets of this day and age. And by age, I mean the age of bipedal mankind.

  He was cordial but abrupt when we were introduced; not friendly, not rude, just curt, which was fine by me—I certainly wasn’t expecting a hug. Some people don’t do well in social situations; writers are notorious for this, and I wasn’t going on a date with the guy, nor were we scheduled to cage fight, so why the attitude, Mr. Poet? Hey, it’s fine by me: Don’t say anything back or look me in the eye when I said it was nice to meet you. Especially when we will be doing a reading together on the last night of the conference and will have to see each other again—that won’t be awkward at all.

  I had no further contact with Mr. Poet after that crusty exchange. When the panel began, we were asked to introduce ourselves and say a little something about our background to the class, which was so full that there were people standing in the back, leaning against the walls. The first writer on the dais talked about the memoir she wrote and how she prepared for it. Everyone was very responsive, and when it came my turn to speak I said that I loved writing humor because every time I showed my underwear to a stranger by accident, or tossed a naked tampon out of my purse at a bag boy, talking and laughing about it made it feel less shitty.