I Love Everybody (and Other Atrocious Lies), Page 2

  Now, the elevator posed some real problems for me, because since I worked on the seventh floor, I had a lot of time to examine people while riding in it. It clearly reinforced the fact that I was not corporate material. All of the people on the third floor, where the telemarketing/call center was located, looked as if they were bussed in from the methamphetamine part of town and spent their days off (when they weren’t cooking up some supplemental income in their biohazard kitchen) having supervised visitation with their kids, who were now in some process of foster care or state custody; the folks on the fourth floor, specimens from the advertising and sales staff, had great tans, chemically altered white teeth, and boobs that started at their collarbones; the tenth-floor people, who held the keys to the kingdom below them, were a bunch of stern, unhappy VPs and execs who looked like they had mandatory rectal exams every morning before they were permitted to get into their Lexuses and go to work. They also had exquisite, beautiful bathrooms on their floor, so marvelous and resplendent they could have belonged to a dictator, which I felt free to use and enjoy as my own personal potty. It turns out that the elevator was a wonderful litmus test for exposing the true personalities of my coworkers as they revealed their inner selves in a thirty-six-square-foot compartment. One of them, a middle-aged woman who still really considered herself eye candy instead of an eyesore, never thought twice, when the elevator had a member of the opposite sex in it, about pulling up her skirt and exclaiming, “Oh, look at my legs! I’ve forgotten to put lotion on this morning! My skin is so dry! It’s a good thing I keep lotion in my purse!” Any member of the opposite sex, including old men and children who were participants in Take Your Son to Work Day, whom she would obliviously shame as he nervously tried to keep his eyes focused on anything but her legs, which were so worn and broken-in that they could have easily been made into a Dooney & Bourke satchel. It was no surprise to me, then, when it was discovered she was messing around with her boss, who then left his wife and family for the purse with legs; he then bought her a truck, and two days after his divorce was final, she dropped him and her lotion bottle for a guy in IT.

  The elevator granted me the opportunity not only to find out who the office sluts were; the nosybodies, the self-absorbed, the smelly, and the clueless all introduced themselves one by one on my flights seven stories up while they annoyed me in various other ways as well.

  I hated them. It was an entirely new breed I hadn’t encountered before.

  They were the Elevator People. Now, honestly, I kept my hatred of the Elevator People to myself because I thought I was alone, it wasn’t to be shared. Then, one day, I heard on the news about how a guy in Canada went berserk and unleashed a canister of pepper spray in an elevator when he had a fight with one of the other passengers about pushing excessive buttons.

  I nodded and almost cried with relief when I heard the story. “Elevator People!” I whispered to myself. Finally, they had pushed someone too far. I knew exactly what he had been through, and this was a Canadian. Canadians are specially bred to be overtly nice, so you know what happened had to be bad. I knew exactly what kind of Elevator People were involved.

  They were the people who got into the elevator after they had eaten pickled herring and raw onion for lunch and then insisted on laughing heartily when nothing funny had happened. The people who make the elevator experience an endurance test for the other elevator riders by holding the door open with a body part while feeling free to finish up the last fifteen minutes of a conversation. The people who go up or down only one floor.

  As a matter of fact, my trip in the elevator most mornings was like a math problem straight out of the SATs. The question would read: “How long will it take Laurie to get to her desk if she and two men get on the elevator on the first floor, she pushes 8, the next man pushes 7, and the other man pushes 9, but on the second floor, a new man gets on and pushes 4, on the third floor, a lady gets on and pushes 5, on the fourth floor, the second-floor man gets out, on the fifth floor, the third-floor lady gets out but another one gets on and pushes 6, on the sixth floor, the fifth-floor lady gets out but another one wants on and hasn’t decided where to meet her sixth-floor friend for lunch so she blocks the elevator door with her foot in a very scuffed-up Payless shoe and says, ‘Downtown Deli? No, we ate there yesterday. Uno’s? No, the wait is too long. Subway? No, I feel like something hot. Well, what are you in the mood for? Any ideas? No, I can’t eat another hot dog after I got sick on that last one. Remember, it was all green at the end? Yuck. Hmmmm. I don’t know. Well, just call me and we’ll decide. Okay, I’ll call you. Or you call me. Okay, I’ll call you. Okay, sure, I’ll call you. Hey, what about Chinese?’ until the door wants to close so badly it threatens to slice her cheap little shoe right off her foot like it was deli ham, so she gets on and then naturally goes to push—what else—7, but the first-floor man already selected it, on the seventh floor the first-floor man gets off alone, and before the elevator hits eight, the Payless-shoe woman realizes she’s missed the seventh floor and pushes 7 again? How long will it take before Laurie reaches her desk? What are the chances that she will even survive?”

  Well, I’ll tell you how long—it took me less time to drive to work than it did for me to get upstairs. So you see, I could completely understand how a gentle, nice-almost-to-the-point-of-being-retarded Canadian could unleash pepper spray in an elevator that eventually forced the evacuation of an entire building because every time the doors opened, the spray was spread. I could understand that. While I had never truly considered brandishing a weapon in the elevator, I had often thought about pinching people. Okay, that’s a lie, I had often fantasized about a cattle prod, but only for the One Floorers. Only for them. And the Payless shoe lady, for her, too. I mean ONE FLOOR, I could never understand why people needed to take the elevator for ONE FLOOR. In my opinion, the company needed to send out a memo that said, “Hey, guess what, you guys! Ever wonder what’s behind the mystery door? It’s STAIRS! We have STAIRS! STAIRS are very similar to an escalator, but one that’s MANUALLY OPERATED.”

  Because I’m telling you, after that day of the elevator math problem, if another person got on that elevator to travel eight feet upward, I couldn’t have been responsible for what I did. I had been pushed to the limit. The next time it happens, I swore to myself, I’m going to reach out and pinch that One Floorer and say, “You get out there and walk! You won’t come close to burning a fraction of the three thousand calories you ate at lunch, but maybe by the time you reach the landing, you’ll pass out from exhaustion and get to go home for the rest of the day, you lazy little asshole, because that’s exactly what you want anyway!”

  I think it’s fair to say I wasn’t exactly fitting the corporate mold.

  One day in the middle of spring, after our newspaper was bought by a large media conglomerate and new management took over, I was summoned to the office of the New Big Cheese for a “Hi, I’m Your New Boss” meeting. With my luck, it was during the week that my allergies had been the worst they had been all season—my nose was red, chafed, and peeling like a snake, my sinuses felt like someone had poured the foundation to a house into them, I had become a mouth breather, which is never a pretty look and for some scientifically undocumented reason makes allergy sufferers speak like a preschooler, substituting b for most letters, even some vowels. Worried that my column was on the chopping block, I popped a bunch of Claritin, slapped some moisturizer on my nose to reduce the skin flake shedding, got all dressed up, and tried to look presentable for the meeting. But when I walked into his office, I knew that even a makeover by Marcia Brady wasn’t going to help me.

  Once I saw the rectal expression on his face, I was concerned that someone may have reported me for engaging in a simulated pinching fantasy incident on the elevator or told him I had been running to the tenth-floor Saddam Hussein Palace bathroom clutching my abdomen an unnecessary number of times.

  But he didn’t say anything about that.

  “Hi,” he said.
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br />   “Hellob,” I said back with a little wave.

  “So, you’re Laurie Notaro,” he said, leaning back in his chair.

  “Yeb,” I said as I sat down. “Nice to beet youb.”

  He nodded.

  I nodded back.

  A snowflake of skin fluttered off my nose, drifting back and forth, twirling here and there, flutter, flutter, flutter, until it landed on his table.

  “Do you like being a columnist?” he said, trying not to stare at me shedding.

  “Yeb, berry much,” I replied, then decided to make a joke. “I’b too ugly for teebee.”

  “That’s good,” he said, looking a little confused.

  Now, at this point, the man’s expression had remained so constant that I wasn’t even sure he had teeth. I had a feeling he wasn’t going to be joining my rotation list for lunch dates.

  “We’re making some changes to the section that your column appears in and—” He stopped short and focused his eyes on my nose.

  And then I saw it. Granted, I didn’t have the vantage point the New Big Cheese had—a full frontal view—but even I, looking down, could see something impressive taking place.

  From above, I saw that it was shiny, spherical, and magnificent in size.

  I, unbeknownst to even myself, had blown an incredibly large bubble from my right nostril, and it was the size of Biosphere 2.

  It was enormous.

  “Oh by Gob!” I cried suddenly, covering my nose with my hands as the Big Cheese looked at me, his mouth agape.

  I saw that he did, indeed, have teeth.

  “Oh by Gob!” I cried over again. I’m sure it was as disturbing to watch as it was to produce, but I had no idea of what I should do. So following my initial instinct (HIDE!), I scurried around but couldn’t find any plants or furniture that I could throw myself behind, and I did that until I felt my second instinct (RUN!).

  I ran around his office a couple more times as the new editor struggled to follow me, holding out something white and floppy—it could have been a tissue, for all I know, but the moment contained so many elements of a disaster that the white thing could have been a handkerchief, a sock, or his underwear, or it may have been a restraining order to keep me away from his office. Finally, I located his door during my last panic lap around the office, bolted out of it, and scurried down to my office and slammed my door shut.

  I blew a mammoth orb out of my nose, I kept saying to myself. It must have looked like a comic strip; he was probably waiting for words to appear in it, saying something like, “Esta burbuja del moco representa mi amor para usted, mi hombre lujurioso de la cara de rectal. Pnchelo! Pnchelo ahora! (This snot bubble represents my love for you, my lusty rectal-face man. Pop it! Pop it now!)” I blew a bubble out my nose. A bubble, a big, nasty bubble, nearly the size of Christina Ricci’s head, came right out of my face.

  My column is history.

  My column is so gone.

  “OUT!” I was sure the Big Cheese was saying right at that moment, “Bubble Girl’s column is out! Unless she’s filling some special needs quota for the paper, she’s out! Let her go get a job in the circus, where her kind belongs! Don’t let her back in the building! God knows where else she may have bubble portals!”

  I was going to lose my column because of the snot balloon, everyone was going to find out why, and I was going to have to quit in order to avoid all the embarrassing questions, whispers, stares.

  I was going to have to quit. Well, I thought, trying to console myself, at least it’s a first. You’ve never really been able to give notice before your employers have done it for you.

  AND THAT, a big, deep, determined voice in my head suddenly interrupted the other voice in my head, IS WHY LAURIE NOTARO NEVER QUITS. SHE NEVER QUITS!! SHE IS NOT A QUITTER!! SHE’S A TWO-ENVELOPE GIRL!!

  Hey, that’s right, I said to myself, although I’m not sure in what voice; it was high and squeaky, so perhaps it was my inner Dr. Phil child voice. I love severance! I love it! I will not quit this job that I love. I will not walk away from it. I will swim through this snot-bubble muck!

  I grabbed my chair, pulled it out, sat down in front of my computer and got ready to work, and that’s when I suddenly sucked in a deep breath and gasped. I knew right then I couldn’t quit anyway, even if I were blowing bubbles out both nostrils like a mermaid.

  I found a pen, rifled through some papers, drew an arrow, and wrote the words “Cancer of the Lower Asshole” right next to the bottom half of my stick figure.

  Baby No Name

  With exactly six days to go before her due date, my pregnant sister Lisa sat on my Nana’s couch and flipped through a baby name book.

  “I don’t know,” she kept repeating over and over again. “I just don’t know. I can’t find anything I like.”

  Admittedly, she was cutting it close, but I’m not so sure that was really all her fault. Every Sunday around the dining room table, my family would try to help my sister find a good, strong name. The problem with that scenario, however, was the tendency of the members of my family—Italian Americans from New York—to believe that they each had found the perfect name and that everyone else’s choice was a sin against nature.

  It was a battle no one was winning, including my sister, and after what she had been through with this pregnancy, she should have at least qualified to be a leading contender.

  A minute after Lisa learned she was pregnant with her second child, her belly expanded to the size of a room addition and salespeople began asking if she was expecting triplets. By now she hadn’t crossed her legs in nearly a year, required a scouting expedition to navigate the widest path through restaurants, and couldn’t get out of a car without the assistance of two Teamsters. Last week when we were at the mall, I looked at her and wondered how she was even able to stand upright, but at least I was happy that someone in my family had wider, more established stretch marks than I did.

  Later that day, as we passed by a rack full of lingerie on sale, she looked longingly at lace demi-bras, the frilly underwires and padded little helpers. “Oh boy, I remember these,” Lisa said as she brushed her fingers against a cream-colored satin A-cup, remembered days gone by and then looked at herself. “These don’t belong on me. They have a promising career in porno. I have the measurements of a Louis the Fourteenth armoire. Remember the pencil test? Well, I can store a summer sausage under there, and a roll of crackers.”

  Her misery was enough to make me want to jot down a request for early, early menopause and submit it to my mother’s prayer chain.

  So by all means, it should have been her decision to name her next son what she wanted, but whenever we asked her, which was about three times a day, she still said she didn’t know.

  “What are we going to call my grandson?” my mother demanded from the dining room table. “Baby No Name?”

  “I just don’t know,” my sister said again, flipping to the next page in the baby name book. “Nothing is hitting me.”

  “What about David?” my mother asked. “That’s a nice name.”

  “Oh God, that’s HORRIBLE,” I said with a yell. “That’s the name of one of my worst ex-boyfriends!”

  “Is that the one you brought to my wedding with the electronic tracking device around his ankle?” Lisa asked.

  “No, no, no. This was the one that said I was trying to trap him into ‘nesting’ because I left my eyeliner and a Janis Joplin CD at his house,” I answered. “The guy with the tracking device was his roommate who was home when I went to pick them up.”

  “How about Paul?” Nana suggested. “Jesus had a friend named Paul and he seemed nice.”

  “No way,” my other sister said. “Paul Crowder was the Booger Boy in my seventh-grade class. He saved his and looked at them under microscopes!”

  “Yeah, that’s a bad name,” I agreed. “Paul DuBois in my eighth-grade class ate a retina from a cow eyeball we were dissecting because another boy bet him five bucks. They made him throw up in the sink, he
got suspended, and in the end had to give the five bucks back, too.”

  “Here’s one,” my pregnant sister said, looking up from the book. “What do you think of Colin?”

  “What kind of idiot name is that?” my mother spit out. “Why would you name a baby after a part of your butt? You might as well name him Rectum, because it’s the same part of the body!”

  “She said ‘Colin,’ Mom, not ‘colon,’” I tried to tell her.

  “Thank God it’s not a girl, you’d probably name her Sphincta,” my mother shot back.

  My sister looked puzzled.

  “She means ‘sphincter,’ ” I translated.

  “That’s what I said!” my mother responded in her native accent. “Sphincta!”

  “I have an idea,” I said, turning to my three-year-old nephew. “Nicholas, what do you think we should call your baby brother?”

  After a careful think, he put his hand on his chin and said, “I think baby brother should be called P. V. Robin.”

  We all just looked at each other until someone asked him why.

  “Um, Robin for Robin Hood from my new video,” he explained. “And P.V. for P. V. Mall.”

  “I think you go shopping with Grandma too much,” I whispered to him.

  “Then how ’bout we name baby brother Disney Store?” he asked.

  “I think you should name him Michael,” my mother inserted. “An M name because he’ll be born in the new MMMM-illennium!”

  I just looked at her. “You didn’t use your protein bingo card today on your new Weight Watchers diet, did you?” I asked. “Besides, your vote is null and void in this election due to the damage you caused when you named each of your daughters the most popular names for the year they were born and they all began with the letter L. You’re disqualified for lack of initiative.”