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October 8th, 2005

Woke up this morning to an army of ants with marching orders taking them from a wall portal below my lakeview window across the teepee’d ridge of the buckled parquet (butter!), into the kitched where the line of troops took a sharp left turn, up ninety degrees along the edge of the cabinets, up, and down into the garbage bag I’d hung between two knobs. I think it was the globs of guac leftover in there fromo my chicken quesadilla dinner last night.

I whipped out the sprayer of “ant killer” (labeled as such and subsequently proved itself as such)– yes, the very same one I’d used as glass cleaner just a couple days ago–and unloaded that thing all over this goddamn apartment. Then I grabbed my stuff, went downstairs and told Rose it wouldn’t be a good day to pack China upstairs owing to its fumigated state, and I hit the beachhead like D-Day in Normandy.

I laughed in the sand to Sedaris. I got in the Surfside surf with the surfers and swam. I walked down through high tide to the Garden City pier and ordered a fried bologna sandwich and a V-8 Spanish. Yes, fried boloney and vegetable juice. That’s one thing I love about myself. That right there.

Then I got five bucks in tokens and unloaded it the video screens. Plastic pistols can be surprisingly cathartic. Gunz yo! Plus a vintage mechanical baseball game. Kind of a woody, proto-pinball with tin players. Then a Moose Tracks milkshake. And then a wide-stanced chaffed-thighs fatboy’s waddle home wear Rose had the friendly pest control man on his knees. He was friendly. They talked about old times, Rose and the bug man.

After spraying up the place uzi-uzi style, I thought the business was taken care of, but Rose knew it wasn’t. The ants had made new alternate trails. And so we’re fumigated again. But the pro-man’s juice isn’t so noxious. Odorless, in fact. But I still may get out here in a run for Hooters. I’m about to start a diet and I can’t leave the south without an ironic–ironic, damn it!–visit to Hooters.

My self-imposed rule, however, is that I can’t go to Hooters until I finish my Sedaris’s smart and hilarious book. I’m getting close. And then I will have my smart and hilarious reward at Hooters. It’s a bit of a reprise, but I’ve got to pull another quote before I finish up.

By the time I reached my thirties, my brain had been strip-mined by a combination of drugs, alcohol, and the chemical solvents used at the refinishing company where I worked. Still, there were moments when, against all reason, I thought I might be a genius. These moments were provoked not by any particular accomplishment but by cocain and crystal methamphetamine–drugs that allow you to lean over a miror with a straw up your nose, suck up an entire week’s paycheck, and think, “God, I’m smart.”

It’s good to examine both sides of the coin, however.

As a perverse and incredibly boring experiment, I am now rying to prove that I can get by without the drugs and the drinking. It was hard for the first few months, but then I discovered that I can live without these things. It’s a pretty miserable excuse for a life, but technically it still qualifies. My heart continues to pump. I can put socks on my feet and make ice; I just can’t sleep.

I am having similar successes and failures.

There. I’m through.

*

[As previously mentioned…]
I’m down here alone in the Redneck Riviera for an extended stay–health reasons, you know–and being Saturday night and all, I decided to have a little night out on the town. Flying in not long ago I couldn’t help but notice all the Hooters airplanes like so many banana boats on the tarmac. Myrtle Beach is what they call a hub in airline parlance. Me, I’m from New York. The word hub doesn’t mean anything to me. My town’s a hub. So what. And Hooters. Is it in Nolita? Then forget it. So I got on my bicycle and started with a little ironic reconnaissance. See what that scene is all about, get me some of that rare owl meat they specialize in. Then maybe catch myself a flick.

Report Back: The Ironic Ending of an Ironic Outing, or
A Thirty-five Year-Old Male’s First Plea for Moral Reform and New Ongoing Rectitude

Did I really expect to find an owl chop on the menu? No. Did I even expect good food? I guess not, in retrospect–Hooters isn’t known for food, it’s known for its never-ending basket of glandular sweetbreads and white meat–but neither did I expect the girls to be so adulteratedly bad! And I don’t mean spank-me-down naughty. I’m talking about Bad with the same capital B used to spell Bimbo. Pure, Grade A, 100%. Who finds panty-hose under shorts attractive? In the slightest? Or, for that matter, orange shorts? Do even high school cheerleaders wear white hightop Reeboks anymore? With leg warmers bunched down around their ankles? With hooters like that, they should really focus on getting some decent baby back ribs in the place.

Inevitably, one of those little satin-assed gorillas came up to get my drink order and began with a manditorily flirty “what’s your name?” When I told her, she wrote it down on a napkin, then said, “I’m Tiffany.” I had to restrain myself from saying, “Of course you are!” She wrote her name down on another napkin. “Very good!” I would have squealed if it hadn’t of been so clearly part of the schtick.

I ordered the New Orleans peel ‘n’ eat shrimp in roux (reddish-brown) sauce, whose suggestive name, incredibly, appeared unintentional. Perhaps it was beyond the reach of the executive management team also responsible for the motto I saw printed on the back of the T-shirts all of the she-apes were wearing. It read “Delightfully tacky yet unrefined.” Yet? Yet? That should be ‘and’ I shouted inside my head. It still pisses me off to think of it.

I had sat myself at the bar facing the kitchen and sipped my lemonade while watching the action, which, yes, did get a little exciting when the archetypally zitty and chunky young fry cook rubbed his nose along the entire length of his latex glove, leaving me to consider a post-order door dash.

Like it or not, my food eventually came, and I found a special tiny mollusk mixed among the shrimp. I baited Tiffany with it next time she came by to swoon over the smell of my sauce.
“Look, I got a little clammy,” I said, trying to join her hey-dear game. “I bet you give one to all the boys.”
“Just the ones I like,” she said.
Oh, she was in the zone! I’d like to say she delivered that line without batting an eyelash, except that was pretty much all she was doing: batting her eyelashes. I was impressed; animatronics have really come a long way.

When I finished my lemonade, another of the orange-u-tans came by get me a refill. As she came back, I’m not sure if I’d caught something out of the corner of my eye, like maybe she’d put something in her mouth. Or maybe I just imagined it after she said with giggled punctuation, “Don’t worry, it’s just roofies.” Wow, the establishment managed to add offense to my distaste and fear.

I had two peel ‘n’ eaters left when I told Tiffany she’d better bring me the check. I had business to take care of. Something bulmicky. And then there it was, printed on the check next to the word server: “Tiffameeee.”
Tiff-a-oh-myyyy-God!

From there I headed over to the Regal movie house tucked into the corner of the mall there and had a friendly spat with the much more wholesome girls of the box office. They remembered me because last time I was there we debated whether it would be more interesting to see a ghost or an alien. We had agreed alien due to the possibility of onboard abduction and anal sex. So I guess that gave them license to give me attitude about seeing the latest Wallace & Gromit vehicle “The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.”
“Have you even seen it?” I snarled.
“No!” they said with a suck of their teeth and a cock of their heads to look back at me slantwise. “It’s rated G!”
“What, are you too cool for G?” I countered–I was like a knife!–but seeing that a family had gathered up behind me, I had nothing left to do but gather up my ticket and change, and sulk on in. Otherwise I would have shouted back, “Oh yeah? Well, my friend Jon is like O. G. on that Wallace & G. Romit tip, yo! And he’s got G. Ood taste, little G. Irls. So you two can G. O. to H. E. double toothpicks.”

*

I just realized, now at 12:25 AM Sunday morn, that I am a product of my grandmothers:
- a hopeful, naive writer on my father’s side,
- a music-loving drug addict with bad knees on my mother’s.

[That sounds more negative than I’d like it to. I love them. I’ll try to afford myself the same respect.]

Entry Filed under: Lifin