No Need for a Curly

Yesterday, I spent eight hours at my job, and two hours at my mechanic's job.

I joked with my wife, after I'd finally arrived home, that "my day was great until I left work." And, for someone who works at an inpatient psychiatric hospital, that's saying something.

Actually, spending two hours with your sixty-eight-year old Israeli mechanic and his indeterminately-aged though much younger Chinese assistant isn't a half bad way to decompress after spending a full working day among 70 psych patients and some similarly-afflicted staff members. At least, at the garage, you've got the bay doors open and the sunlight is streaming in, and you're surrounded by cars, in various states of disrepair. Cars and mechanics-- simpler both than your average psych patient.

Soly and Jack have been working together since "1996 or '97, I can't remember," said Jack when I asked him yesterday. Soly, the sunburnt sabra, screams and curses. Jack, the obedient Chinese assistant, dutifully and quietly takes abuse. Soly is very much like hot-tempered Moe, and Jack is definitely Larry-- hapless, in the way, liable to get his hair pulled and his face smacked.

The only thing missing in that garage is a Curly, but I don't see any twinkle-toed, obese, balding men with high-pitched voices and a propensity for playing the spoons entering the picture anytime soon. Though I don't think it would surprise me if one did.

I went to see Jack and Soly yesterday because, on Tuesday, they changed my tires and noticed that I needed new front brakes and rotors.

"Why?" I asked.

"WHY?!" Soly screamed into the phone, "because the FAH-KEENG ESS-HOLE who owned your car before you put brakes on WITHOUT CHANGING THE ROTORS! Volvo, BMW, and Mercedes, if you change the brakes, you HAVE TO CHANGE THE ROTORS!"

And now I know that. And so do you. The person who owned my car before me obviously didn't know that, and now she was being maligned by some short, angry Israeli in a dirty work shirt and shorts that she'd never met.

This is what life is.

And so, yesterday, I went to Soly and Jack's to have my brakes (AND ROTORS) put on. But they didn't fit.

So they ordered another set to be delivered to the shop. They arrived forty-five minutes later, during which time I watched Soly fight with two customers and turn someone away who wanted to buy scrap metal from him for $0.15 a pound.

"What am I, a fah-keeng retarded?" he asked me, rhetorically, I presumed.

The second set of rotors didn't fit either.

"Oh my God, wat dee fak! JACK! Call Jeff and tell him to get me rotors here now. GODDAMNIT!"

I stared at my car, up on the lift, with the two front tires off. I wasn't going anywhere fast, so I sat down on a rickety wooden chair and enjoyed the atmosphere and the conversation. Mrs. Apron had been there earlier that morning to get her oil changed and her car inspected and to get new wiper blades on.

"So," Jack said to me as he was yanking a 16-inch tire off the rim of a 2009 Ford Econoline van that had just failed its emissions inspection, "you gonna have twins-- you the big daddy. No more money."

"That's right, Jack," I said, smiling, "so enjoy swiping my debit card today-- if you guys ever get the right fucking rotors here."

He laughed.

Other people might have been indignant about spending two hours in a garage, especially after they'd just worked a full day, but I wasn't. Because we could talk, about having twins, about mortgage rates, about what it's going to be like for my father if my wife and I have at least one boy.

"Let me tell you," Soly said, "for Iraqi Jews, if you have a son-- forget about it. That is eeet! He going to have your father around his finger, for good."

"I sure didn't have him wrapped around my finger-- my sister was always the favorite."

"But you are good," Jack said, furrowing his brow, "you always do the right thing, you grown up."

"Jack, shut up!" Soly yelled, "dat's not what eet is about! The sister is like the father, so he look like he like her more. But he is good. You are good. I didn't go to school for a fucking psychology, I can talk to you for five minutes and I know that you are good. And your father would facken' kill himself to make you happy."

It's funny, discussing the dynamics of your family with your car mechanics, but we've known Soly and Jack fifteen (maybe fourteen) years. I took my first car for its first oil change there. The barber who gave me my first haircut. The doctor who gave me my first shot. These connections mean something to me, and I cannot let them go.

And, even after two hours and three sets of rotors, I don't much want to.

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."

Improvisation Strongly Discouraged

I call myself a writer often enough, though my I.D. badge from work says "Psych Tech & Allied Therapist." Then again, it could be wrong. My driver's license says, "5'11" and we all know that I'm 6 feet of pent-up aggression, charming mania, social awkwardness, and limb fur.

Calling yourself a writer is rather a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it's one of those respectable things to call yourself, that makes people say, "Oh!" instead of "Oh." Of course, I don't get paid for writing, at least not regularly, and so that begs the question, "Are you only a thing if you get paid for the thing?" I mean, when I'm acting, I don't get paid, but I'm still probably acting.

Probably-- although, when I informed a former coworker of mine that I frequently appear in G&S operettas, he asked, quite innocently, "Oh, and do you also, like, do you act, too?" The unbearable seconds of silence that followed this question were most likely harder for him than for me.

The main thing that's troublesome about calling yourself a writer is that it sort of increases the expectation in most people that you will, you know, write. I suppose I have brought the "I will post something on here everyday" thing on myself, but I don't regret it, not for a second, and I certainly wouldn't ever be so crass as to blame you for it. Just because you may have been conditioned to expect something doesn't necessarily obligate me to deliver on it. I mean, look at "Dear Apron." For a while, it was a sporadic thing, whenever I felt like it, then it became an every Friday thing for maybe nine months or so, and now it's sporadic again. I mean-- whatever.

I did feel guilty about not blogging for six weeks or whatever it was-- but, I needed to find a job. And, now that I hate my job and realized I'm working with psychopaths-- some on the payroll, some not-- I need to find another one. Don't worry, though, as long as there's money rolling in, I won't leave you again.

There's another troublesome aspect to calling yourself a writer, or maybe in just believing yourself to be a writer. You want to write-- you want to write... for everyone. I don't know if this is true for all writers, or some, or just me and Dave Eggers, but I have this irritating little habit of wanting to write little scriptlettes for most of the people in my life. I find myself saying, "Gee, wouldn't it be really great if she said this right now?" and, "Oh, I just know my rotten outlook would do a 180 if he responded to me with this, instead of that." and what about the awesome, unanswerable and quite frankly dangerous, "Why couldn't she have just said this!?"

Well, because she didn't, a-hole. And because there's no answer to why questions. That's why.

I failed the bench-press portion of the police physical agility test I took on Saturday. I blew the doors off the 300M sprint, and even the mile-and-a-half run. I squeezed the trigger of an inoperable gun into a four-inch barrel nineteen times with my right hand in 10 seconds, and eighteen times with my left hand in 10 seconds-- you had to do it twelve times. But lifting 120 pounds up over my head-- could not be done.

Just like in 2003. Instant. Replay. Just add a few lines under my eyes, a few white hairs on my head, and more dark ones on my ears.

When I called my wife to break the bad news to her, her responses were clipped, brief, short, and depressed. She was "very disappointed," as was I. I, of course, had set her up for failure by expecting she would say certain things that, in my heart-of-heart, after knowing her for seven years now, knew she would not say, because it simply isn't her.

"I'm sure you gave it your best shot!"

"You'll get 'em next time, buddy!"

"I'll bet you were really close."

"Hey, I'm sure you did better than a lot of other people."

"You will do this one day, I believe in you."

"I'm sorry you're disappointed, but I support you."

People usually do not react the way you want them to, in most, if not all, situations. I can't tell you how many times back in high school I was in a bedroom alone with an attractive female friend and wished that she would have walked over to the door and pushed in the doorknob lock after deciding today was the day she was going to model every item in her underwear drawer for me.

How many times I wanted a mentor to say, "I'll take care of you-- you're a genius and will be an asset to my business-- here's a job. And health insurance. You and your wife can go have a baby now. Hope it's triplets."

How many times I wanted my father to say something to me that wasn't mispronounced, broken English, obscenity-laced and simple.

Well, just like preconceived reactions and verbalizations from peers, family, friends, those things just don't happen. People deviate from the script all the time, because they don't know there's a script to begin with, because it's inside the writer's head, blocked from their view by cerebrospinal fluid, a myelin sheath, and a thick, truculent fuck-of-a-skull. And a lot of brown hair.

And a few white ones, to fool you into thinking that I'm no longer a little boy with unreasonable, unrealistic, uncompromising expectations-- of people, and of self.

How Does Your Garden Grow?

We're trying our hands at gardening, we Aprons are.

I'll be the first to admit, we have no idea what we're doing.

Not only that, we have no business doing what we're doing.

We're murderers of all things chlorophyll'd. Why ought we be allowed to garden? It's rather like licensing a convicted pedophile to open up a nursery school or a Rita's Water Ice franchise.

Still, we're giving it our best shot. Our side-yard (we have no backyard, and our front yard is all pachysandra (except for the little strip of grass on the curb, which some anonymous do-gooder mowed for us while we were at work yesterday-- creepy, embarrassing, shameful, weird) is exceptionally small, but we have turned it into a micro-garden of sorts.

Peppers

Broccoli (for me, the veggie fetishist)

Tomatoes

and Pumpkins

Yes-- probably pumpkins aren't exactly the wisest things to grow in a garden no bigger in diameter than the average child's coffin, but then, no one ever said we were wise. Or gardeners.

We're just two stupid kids in love who are trying to share our love with as many things as possible. I mean, we have two dogs. We're trying to make a baby (which hole is it again?) and we're fumbling our way through attempts to make friends with people, even though I don't particularly like people, and now we're trying to lavish a little love on some growy-type things.

The broccoli is doing especially well. I'd describe what it looks like for you, but every single adjective I was thinking of using sounds pornographic. Except "green."

So, um, it's green. We good?

My maternal grandfather, Harry, had a garden. Actually, I think I'll refer to him as "Zayda" because that's what we called him. Not "my Zayda" but "Zayda." In fact, I thought "Zayda" was his name until I was about ten. Anyway, Zayda was the only person I ever knew growing up who grew things. Zayda's garden was serious, because Zayda was serious. He never joked about anything that I can recall. All the conversations I ever had with him were serious, including the last conversation I ever had with him-- about men's fashion and my belief that the three-piece suit would come back. He agreed. Three weeks later, he was dead. That was 1992, and he didn't live to see my Bar Mitzvah or the hipster fancy-dress revolution in which, in my opinion, skinny ties and three-piece-suits feature prominently. And I think that's unfortunate.

In the fortunate department, he also didn't live to see my sister marry a Christian mailman.

Zayda grew tomatoes and cucumbers. I loved wandering through his garden as a little boy and smelling the vegetation, just inhaling God, I guess. It was as close as I ever got to religion-- the Bar Mitzvah doesn't count, as I suspect it doesn't for most Jewish men. It's hard to justify and appreciate an inflated, expensive ceremony proclaiming you a man before you've got your first pube.

I loved going to Zayda's garden. He didn't show me anything about it, or teach me anything about it, and we never re-enacted the scene from "The Godfather" where Marlon Brando chases the fucking kid around the garden with an orange-peel slice in his mouth and has a heart attack. Zayda had his final heart attack while putting on his tie to get ready for work one morning.

It's funny-- I really wanted this to be about our garden and gardening, but all of a sudden it's about Zayda and heart attacks and pubes. Life is so funny, don't you think? I say that a lot, but I really believe it's true. And it's funny in every way something can be funny-- in the humorous and the depressive and the strange and the quixotic. It's unpredictable, sure, and you never know what's going to work and what's going to fail, and what's going to survive the harshest of times. In that respect, I guess life is like a garden. Or a blog post.

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.