Snoogle Up Close

Pregnancy, I'm told, does funny things to a woman's body.

"Things just aren't in the right place," my wife is fond of saying. And I suppose I know what she means, but only sympathetically, not empathetically. I can guess what she means, is what I'm saying. Like, there's two babies in there, pushing up against her bladder or whatever, taking up room, being weird and turny and tumbly and shit in there.

They're shitting. in. there.

Gross.

And her breasts are huge-- they're not where they're "supposed to be" either. They're everywhere, actually. Her belly isn't where it's "supposed to be".

Nothing is where it's supposed to be.

This makes things like reaching for a glass in the upper kitchen cupboard tricky for my 5'0" wife, because her belly is round and it goes up against the counter and it gets in her way because, you know, it's not where it's supposed to be. The counter or the belly-- more the belly, though.

Sleeping's kind of a biatch, too-- for my wife and, consequently, for me, too. It's a bit of a shit because, during this time of pregnancy, while the children are all ensconced in amniotic fluid and plasma and Jell-O or whatever it is, we're supposed to be getting all the sleep we're not going to have again for the next fifteen-or-so years.

And yet, at 21 weeks, we're not sleeping.

There was little sleeping in Ireland, because my poor wife is besotted by body parts that aren't where they're supposed to be. If Mrs. Apron could go back in time and star in a Monty Python's Flying Circus sketch, she'd be in the "Society for Putting Things on Top of Other Things" because, in her life as a pregnant biddy, things are most definitely on top of other things.

And she can't sleep.

And, consequently, I can't sleep.

So, on the recommendation of several of our friends, we went to Babies R' Us on Friday afternoon to purchase a maternity sleeping implement, called "The Snoogle".

It looks like an enormous tapeworm. Or a big, white, turd.


Don't ya think?

It set us back $64.99 (plus tax) but, hey, I reasoned with myself after spending approximately $3,000 in Ireland, if it helps Mrs. Apron sleep, it's going to more than pay for it on its first night.

And it sure did.

Mrs. Apron passed a snoozeful night's rest on Friday night. I, however, had a terrible and fitful night's sleep. See, I don't know if you can tell from the picture, but this Snoogle is gigantic-- and we have a full-size bed. And we have two dogs-- fortunately one is elderly and arthritic and can't get up on the bed anymore. But the smaller, agile one sure can, and does. So, there's six of us up on this bed:

Mrs. Apron
Molly, the dog
Mr. Apron
Twin A
Twin B
The Snoogle

So, while Mrs. Apron was wrapped around the Snoogle, Molly was pressed up against me, and I was jammed up against the Snoogle. I woke up constantly, which was problematic for me, because I had to work on Saturday, and the alarm was set for 5:15am.

I didn't make it that long.

I woke up at 3:31am, with a bladder so full I'm sure my eyeballs were yellow, so I peed. Then I got back into bed and, eventually, I fell asleep.

And, apparently, it was at some point between that moment and 4:25am when I had sex with my wife's Snoogle.

I wish I could deny it, but there was copious, um, DNA evidence to suggest that's what happened.

I was dreaming about this Jamaican girl, who wasn't really Jamaican, but was a wizard, and, if I had sex with her, she would lose all of her magical powers and become a regular Jamaican, non-Jamaican human or whatever-- and, evidently, I got it into my head that freeing this woman of her wizarding powers was a good thing, so I balled her.

More accurately, I balled my wife's Snoogle.

I never thought of myself as the kind of guy who'd be unfaithful, the idea of cheating on the woman I love more than anyone else in the world is unfathomable to me-- the callous disrespect and disregard for her emotions and for the vows we made to each other on October 22nd, 2006 would be unthinkable to me. And yet, on Friday night, I cheated on her. In our own bed. While she was lying there, in a blissful, heretofore fleeting sleep, only a snoogle away.

That's Some Funny, Sir

I often fall into the trap that lots of people my age find themselves in, or never realize that they're in to begin with, and that's the trap of fooling myself into thinking -- no, knowing -- that I'm experienced: broad-minded and worldly.

And then, every so often, I realize that I'm just another sheltered, Jewish mama's boy from the suburbs. With post-nasal drip, of course.

Yesterday at the psychiatric hospital that, for eight hours a day is my home, I had the opportunity to experience a first. I have experienced many firsts at my current job-- and I've only been there exactly one month. I have seen male masturbation, and I would say that I've seen more than my fair share of said activity. I have also seen people wander around hallways naked; I have seen patients and staff members get attacked and have intervened physically to restrain patients. I have held patients down while they have received medicine to calm them down, and I have applied full leather restraints to patients to tie them to beds after they have been assaultive.

I've seen some cray-cray shit, and it's really just the beginning-- the very humble beginning. And that's just the shit that I've seen. The shit that I've heard? Forget about it.

But yesterday I had the unusual experience of sitting in a chair, beside an elderly, black, female patient. She was in a wheelchair, covered up to her chin with a blanket, with a Phillies hat on her head, at a jaunty, 1940's angle. She's missing around seven teeth on the bottom row-- she lost two just a couple weeks ago at the hospital. I saw one of them in a Zip-Loc baggie in the nurse's station. It looked archeological.

"I don't know why they didn't just nail that shit back in there, sir," said Gladys (not her real name-- fuckin' duh) "the roots was good. The top was good."

"I don't know, Gladys," I replied, "that tooth of yours that I saw looked like a twenty year old Rice Krispie."

Gladys cracked up. She loves messing around, and I love it, too. She'll look at you out of the corner of her eye after a jest, to check you out-- to make sure you're on the level, and then the corners of her mouth will turn up and she'll start laughing. And it's good medicine.

"You're a funny motherfucker, sir," she said to me, giggling. I said thank you. Gladys has known me for a month now, and she knows my name, but she insists on calling me "Sir." I've stopped asking her to stop. "I got some jokes for you, sir," Gladys said, scratching one of the cornrows under her Phillies hat. "You wanna hear some of my jokes?"

"Definitely," I said, putting my clipboard down on the floor. "Wait-- are they clean?"

She looked at me.

"Fuck, no."

"Excellent," I said, folding my arms and adjusting in my chair, "let's hear it."

"Okay," Gladys said, "first one goes like this: See, there's this black man and he's on the train, you know? And he's sittin' there, just sittin' there on the train, sir, and he's got this big ol' roach on his shoulder, sir-- just sittin' there on his shoulder, on the train, see? And the steward, he comes walkin' down the aisle checkin' all the tickets, and he sees this roach, and he brushes it off the black man's shoulder, and the black man says, 'Shit, mothafucka, leave that roach alone. Man! Everythin' a black man has, people be tryin' to take away from him.'" I let out a laugh and Gladys checked me out, cracked a grin, and she started laughing, too.

"You like that, sir?" she asked.

"I do," I said, nodding.

"That's some funny shit, sir."

"Yeah-- it is."

"I got another one, sir."

"Proceed," I said.

"So, there's a Chinese man, a white man, and a black man, and they's all sittin' down at a bar gettin' drunk-- they havin' a good time, sir. And in walks Jesus Christ. He comin' on down to the bar to have a few, you know. And the Chinese guy, he says, 'Oh, shit! That Jesus,' and he walk up to Jesus and he say, 'Jesus, I got leprosy, I'll buy you a drink if you pray for me and take away my leprosy,' you know. And Jesus touch him and you know his leprosy got cured.

And the white man, he say, 'Jesus, I got these migraine headaches-- bad. Can you touch me and take away my migraine headaches?' (I guess the white guy didn't offer to buy J. C. a drink.) And Jesus said, 'Fuck, yeah,' and he touches this white dude and take away his headaches.

And then Jesus walks up to the black dude, he on crutches, see-- and Jesus start to reach out to the black dude, and the black dude he say, "Motherfucker, I'll buy you a drink, but don't be fuckin' touchin' me-- I'll lose my disability check."

And, as I laughed, and as Gladys laughed, after checking me out first, of course, I laughed with the selfconscious uneasiness of a suburban, Jewish mama's boy (with post-nasal drip, of course) who had never before heard, live and in person, a black person tell a "black people" joke.

While calling me "sir."

Smile

I have fucked up teeth.

My canines are perhaps more befitting their name than most. Actually, they should probably be dubbed "fangnines."

It's very appropriate, I think, that I have such disordered and discombobulated dentition, because, as an ardent Anglophile, my teeth are really the only thing about me that looks remotely English. I know, I know: and a thousand-and-three other stereotypes. So sue me, 'enry, 'iggins.

If I had my pre-teen, tween, and teen years to do over again, there are a few things I would do differently, knowing what I know now about how all that turned out. The biggest thing I would change, besides my name, would be that I would have gotten braces.

Kids are funny little bastards. Some are more delusional than others-- and I was more delusional than most. By the time I turned fourteen or fifteen, I was definitely operating under the misapprehension that, if I got braces, that would somehow be the tipping point (in the bad way) as concerns my personal, aesthetic appearance.

Post Bar Mitzvah, I was forty pounds underweight for my height, with angry, pugnacious acne, frizzy hair, oversized glasses and poor posture-- I was not winning any Campbell's Soup endorsements, let's just put it that way. Maybe I could have scored a March-of-Dimes poster, if my parents had hired me that agent they sometimes talked about back in 1994 when they humored notions that I might turn out to be the star of stage and screen that would save the family from an eternity of middle class doom and less-than-desirable retirement homes.

But, alas and alack-a-day, it was not meant to be.

Whenever my mother or a dental professional would approach me about braces to correct my wayward chompers, I would steadfastly refuse. There was one reason for this: I was awkward enough, and if I was ever going to be the recipient of a handjob performed by someone other than Leftie, I was going to have to at least maintain the status quo, as regrettable as my yearbook pictures evince that it was.

When I turned sixteen, my mother made the mistake of trusting me to drive myself to the dentist for the watershed appointment concerning braces. Out of her eagle-like shadow and presence, I pretended to listen closely as the dentist recited the litany of rational reasons why I should get braces. He handed me the business card of the periodontist who would perform the work and I shook his hand, promising to call that afternoon. As I walked out of the office, I slipped the business card under the windshield wiper of a white Chevrolet Cavalier with a spray-painted front license plate that said, "NIKKI." That was the name of the dental technician from the office.

If I can just maintain, I thought to myself as I got into my car and drove away from that dentist's office, surely the handjobs will follow.

They did not follow. High School was a period of unrelenting romantic failures. Actually, I can't even really honestly call them failures, because, for something to be a failure, it at least has to be attempted. You can't fail at climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro if you are sitting at home in your apartment in Des Moines, drinking Swiss Miss and watching "So You Think You Can Quieff." My high school experience was like a desert, with me occasionally rubbing up against a cactus for comfort.

And I thought it would have been bad if I'd had braces!

Of course, by the time I was handjob material, had I gotten braces when I should have gotten them, the braces would have already been off and my teeth would have been straighter than Bob Dole.

But that's another story.

Today, as a happily married man, I don't so much mind my teeth. At least, not until somebody says something about them. Once, when portraying Sir Joseph Porter, K.C.B. in "H.M.S. Pinafore" a nice, elderly lady came up to me afterwards and said,

"Oh, my, you were so funny! Now, tell me-- were those joke teeth?"

A year earlier, a different leathery old crone came up to me after a production of "Patience" and asked if my eyebrows were real. Now that I'm doing "The Sorcerer" I suppose someone will ask me if my head is really a fucking decomposing pumpkin or if my nose is a partially regurgitated apricot.

There's a theory I'm quite fond of about humor, and the theory is that humor, when it's at its most effective, is painful. If that is true, and I believe fondly that it is (haven't you ever experienced acute pancreatic pains during an episode of "Maude"?) then I suppose most of our lives are pretty goddamned funny-- because it's all basically pain, isn't it? A pain in the eyebrows? A pain in the teeth? A pain in the ass. The head. The heart. But we laugh it off as we bite into the core of life, leaving our funny little teethmarks behind.