Laurie Notaro - I Love Everybody

I Love Everybody

(and Other Atrocious Lies)

Laurie Notaro

Villard

NEW YORK

To D. O. Hopkins

and my Pop Pop:

Wish you were here.

Contents

Gun to the Head

I cant believe it, my mother said from her end of the phone, I simply cant believe it. First you got married, and now this. Who would have thought a year ago that I would be hearing news like this!

I know! I exclaimed from my end of the phone. Ill get to go shopping for new clothes and everything!

Its a big thing, my mother added. It will change your whole life, you know.

I know, I said happily. But I think its time. That clock was ticking, and it was just time I did something about it.

Youre sure this is what you want? my mother asked.

Its too late to turn back now, isnt it? I laughed. I took the test, got a little pee on my hand, and everything says were good to go.

I cant wait to tell my friends! my mother gushed.

Well, maybe thats not such a good idea just yet, I suggested. Maybe we should see if it sticks first. But you can tell Dad and the rest of the family.

Hes going to be so happy to find out that youre going to havemy mother paused, I believe to wipe a tear of elation from her eyea job!

A job.

I really couldnt believe it either. A job. After I had successfully passed the drug screening test (simply and vaguely put, I was a freelance writer with a mortgage payment and a husband in college who barely had enough money for a generic box of macaroni and cheese, let alone a hit of X just so I could have a good excuse to wear a Dr. Seuss hat), the newspaper at which I had been a freelance columnist also offered me a job as a columnist for the newspapers websitea full-time gig. I could hardly pass the offer up; it was a good salary, came with health insurance, my potential boss seemed cool, and after I discovered that the 401(k) was not an annual marathon that every employee was required to participate in, I nodded and then we shook on it.

In all honesty, it was a relief. The last time I had held a steady job it was as an editor for a small magazine several years before. I worked for a man who commonly came back from business lunches with a big purple wine mustache and had the habit of uttering phrases such as make that more better, irregardless, for all intensive purposes, and picking a five-syllable word from the dictionary then e-mailing it out to the staff as the word du jour of the day! which for an average drunk boss would be fine, but for an editor in chief was somewhat unsettling.

After he called me into his office one day and slid two envelopes across the tableone for my last paycheck and the other for severancehe tried to soften the blow with the comforting words, Dont look so upset! Youre not being fired, your position has just been eliminated! It wasnt a surprise per se, I had expected the Two Envelope Incident ever since I had freely used the phrase blow your wad in an editorial meeting when vocalizing an opinion about why it would be a mistake to name the murderer in the headline of an investigative piece about a longtime unsolved crime. From across the table, I had seen his purple mustache quiver, then collapse into a frown.

Matter of time.

Since then I had embarked on a series of freelance jobs that led me down the creative, soul-drenching path of writing about air conditioners with pollen-capturing filters; weaving prose about toenail fungus and the bacteria living happily in the track of your shower door that can kill at will; two hundred witty and classic-caliber-status product reviews of kitchen gadgets, including profiles of slotted spoons, rubber spoons, stainless steel spoons, serving spoons, and the good old spoon spatulas (spoonulas); a pamphlet about the money-saving benefits of hiring temps; and a booklet about gun safety.

Honestly, I didnt go to journalism school to write pamphlets advising otherwise oblivious parents that it would be in their best interest to store their loaded weapons out of reach of their younguns, but one day I found myself in a job interview discussing just that.

With a gun in the middle of the table.

Have you ever held a gun before? the lady whom I was meeting with asked me.

No, no, I said with a little nervous laugh, feeling a little underqualified for the job. My family were staunch believers in physical violence, not automatic violence, and we had a Safeway around the corner, so we never really needed to kill anything.

Would you like to hold the gun? the lady asked. It would be useful to know what a gun looks like when writing the material for the booklet.

Oh. Oh, okay, in that case, I replied nodding hesitantly, as I reached slowly for the gun.

Its not loaded, the lady informed me with a wave of her hand.

Sure, thats what they all say, I tried to joke, with a wave of my hand that wasnt touching a deadly weapon.

I picked it up. It was heavy. It was some sort of pistol, I dont know what kind, but I did know that I did NOT like having a gun so close to me. I felt like I should be wearing a tracksuit with racing stripes or a Members Only windbreaker and sucking on a toothpick.

Okay, thats good, the lady said, then put her hand out. Ill take it now.

So I handed her the gun, I mean, it was her gun, I certainly hadnt brought a gun to the meeting, what was I going to say, No, Annie Oakley, you cant have your gun?

What was I supposed to do?

Obviously, however, I had done the wrong thing. Because in a fraction of a moment, I was looking down the barrel of a gun that was now being pointed straight at me. At my head. It was nothing short of a miracle that I did not suddenly lay a big brown egg in my pantalones, if you know what I mean.

NEVER, the lady commanded, LET ANYONE TAKE A GUN AWAY FROM YOU, NEVER .

Holy shit, I thought. Holy shit. Holy shit. Holy shit. What the hell is happening here? What the hell just happened? Is the gun lady going to kill me? Did she lure me here to kill me? Oh my God, Im not that Notaro! I wanted to scream. Those people live in New Jersey!

IF YOU GIVE SOMEONE A GUN, THEY JUST MAY POINT IT AT YOU, she continued, the pistol still focused on the spot between my eyes.

You said it wasnt loaded, I said, trying to stay calm.

And you believed me? the gun lady said. I only met you five minutes ago.

I really didnt know what to do. Should I be putting my hands up at this point? I wanted to ask her; if its possible, could you shoot me in a major organ below my neck as opposed to, say, an eye, I dont want to be the ghost with one eye or half a face or anything like that, I would prefer to be spooky in the spirit afterlife, not creepy; can you please dump my body where someone will find me relatively quickly so my mother can have the funeral shes always dreamed of because it will be hard for folks to work up an appetite for the party after if they know Im all rotten and yucky under the lid, and I bet shell probably have better catering at this shindig than she did at my wedding, so if Im all decomposed it will totally ruin the whole thing for her; do I have time to make a phone call so I can tell someone what I want to be buried in, because otherwise, Ill be spending the remainder of history in my Gone with the Wind wedding dress, and its superhard to pee in, a skirt would be much better, especially if the afterlife has a bar; and by the way, I am not having an affair with your husband, if thats what this is all about, and if youre having an affair with mine, hes all yours. Enjoy the ear hair, it keeps getting longer every day.

Instead, I just looked at her and decided I really didnt need to be concerned with being rude at this point, since lethal elements had already been introduced into the scenario, so I said, You know, you are really freaking the shit out of me.