Adding a Little Levity Read online

  I went through a long dry spell before I met Crystal at a bar one night. Having had far too much to drink, I couldn’t recall all parts of the evening with equal clarity. I knew I wanted to see Crystal again and vaguely remembered her saying something about tricks, so I concluded that she must be a magician. Excited, I told everyone I knew.

  I invited Crystal to dinner at an upscale restaurant to join a friend of mine and his wife. Crystal seemed bewildered by the forks, spoons, and knives in front of her, but I thought nothing of it. After dinner, she lit up a cigarette, prompting the maître d’ to quickly appear at our table to discreetly remind her there was no smoking in the restaurant. Just as quickly as he arrived at our table did he depart, scampering away from the verbal abuse directed his way by dear Crystal.

  My friend and his wife thought it was a good time to leave the restaurant, excused themselves, and left with exceptional haste. Alone now, Crystal and I walked for a while, and then she asked me what my preferences were. I told her that I preferred the Yankees over the Mets. She kissed me on the forehead, and I never saw her again.

  I can’t forget my only date with Blake Gordon. Now Blake can be both a girl’s name and a boy’s name, but it wasn’t only her name that I found confusing. She was a likable young lady. We teased each other quite a bit, and the few times we playfully jostled each other, I noted an uncommon degree of strength. We had a pleasant evening, which culminated with a long, sultry kiss goodnight.

  I never saw her again after that, although a couple of weeks later, I saw a well-built man with his shirt off operating a jackhammer at a construction site. He had an uncanny resemblance to Blake, and I hoped to God she had a twin brother.

  Not often do beauty and brains reside in a single person, but they did in Mackenzie Parker. Her figure and fine features were unquestionably alluring, and she was so smart that I rarely understood what she was talking about. She was preparing several scholarly articles for publication. The two we discussed in detail were: “The Interpretation of the Dreams of Emasculated Men in a Post-Feminist World” and “The Destructive Forces of Chivalry in a Post Post-Feminist World.” Mackenzie was a very well-educated young woman, an intellectual who had spent seven years at Smith College to earn her bachelor’s degree in militant women’s studies. I was willing to discuss any topic that helped me get closer to her.

  If it wasn’t one of her articles we were discussing, then it was the shortcomings of her psychiatrist, Lazslo, with whom she had a love-hate relationship. As critical as she was about Lazslo, she never made a major (or minor, for that matter) decision without consulting him. Mackenzie was high-strung and disoriented when she faced a decision and he was unavailable. Now that I think about it, she was high-strung and disoriented even when not facing a decision. But her figure explained my persistence. One day, she lambasted me, saying with equal amounts of fury, impatience, and condescension, “Haven’t you read Kierkegaard?” And all I had asked her was whether she wanted Italian or Chinese. Anyway, I wasn’t sure whether Kierkegaard was the rookie shortstop for the Minnesota Twins or the fellow who piloted the Kon-Tiki, so I simply smiled weakly and didn’t respond.

  After a couple of tense weeks, Mackenzie began to relax. Our courtship ended after an evening of dinner and a movie with easy conversation and lots of laughs. We walked to her apartment holding hands. I said goodnight and attempted to kiss her, but she recoiled at the strategic moment, saying she would have to ask Laszlo for permission.

  Smarting from this rejection and increasingly desperate, I bumped—both figuratively and literally—into Nicolette Wilder. Nicolette was a voluptuous young woman with a chest that demanded attention. I believe that her creator was so focused on crafting a perfect body that he may have overlooked even some basic work on the cranial side of things.

  Nicolette wasn’t sure which oceans bordered the east and west coasts of the United States. She refused to believe that the Earth was spinning, and while using a compass, thought that north was always the direction in which you were walking. I dated her for a few weeks but never really got a good look at her face. I fantasized about marrying her but concluded I would be forever spilling hot soup on my shirt and tie (assuming she could learn how to prepare soup).

  At this point, I clearly needed a change of course. Why not try a dating website? I tried looking at some of the more exotic ones: the Moldavian, Lithuanian, and Mongolian ones, to name a few. But it was through a Latina dating site that I met Beatriz, a Cuban émigré who, I would soon find out, had way more energy than I did. Beatriz—who spent most of her waking hours dancing merengue and salsa—would drag me to obscure clubs in bad neighborhoods where she seemed to know everyone, including the menacing-looking ones.

  Being an old-fashioned guy, I am accustomed to the male protecting the female, but I am quite certain that if Beatriz weren’t with me, I would have been relieved of both my wallet and my consciousness in a back alley. I wasn’t a very good dancer, and my only exposure to merengue and salsa was in a restaurant a few months before. Beatriz, on the other hand, moved with energy, style, and Emilio, her strapping six-foot-three dancing partner, whom she assured me was gay.

  She tried showing me the dance steps, without much success, and then pleaded, “Allow Emilo to teach you.” Exhausted, I reluctantly agreed. Cheek to cheek and holding hands, Emilio led me through the salsa and merengue steps. I didn’t get any better, and he started to enjoy it too much. Beatriz started to lose her patience, which is something I could ill afford in that neighborhood. I pretended I was feeling queasy, politely excused myself, and left while I still could.

  Beatriz made me realize I wasn’t in very good shape, so I joined a local gym, where I met Nikki. I don’t know what attracts me to fanatical women, but Nikki’s gym was Beatriz’s dance floor. Nikki was a workout warrior who also professed to be an expert in nutrition. Before long, she was prescribing exercises, foods to eat, foods to avoid, herbs, vitamins, mineral supplements.

  Being an assertive (and strong) young woman, she ignored my protests. Weekend nights, when most normal people would be taking in dinner and a movie, found us grunting amorously to each other during bench-press reps. During these torture sessions, I thought of nothing other than the shower that followed and a good meal at a nice restaurant. But Nikki, who didn’t trust restaurant food, insisted on cooking for me whenever we were together. Every meal seemed to be the same—suma root, sprouted mung beans, wheatgrass, chia seeds, and something that looked like insect larvae. Only the relative portions of each changed.

  When I complained of early onset dyspepsia, Nikki knew exactly what I needed and prepared several Kohlrabi–Tiger Nut–Cucamelon smoothies, with chia seeds, of course, sprinkled on top. I ignored the occasional feeling of stomach bloat, which coincidentally began on the day I met Nikki, and achieved relief through controlled flatulence. I broke out in hives, especially in the facial area, and no amount of breath mints could protect the people around me from the odor that accompanied my speech. The bloat and flatulence persisted, but my control was unable to keep up. My coworkers at Dairy Queen gently advised that it would be best for me to remain in back and not serve customers at the counter. A couple of days later, they urged me to simply stay home. Nikki redoubled her efforts in the kitchen to devise more poison potions to help me get better. Out of desperation, I declared I was going on a hunger strike to protest the use of genetically modified seeds in our food supply, and after three short months, she lost interest and left me.

  At last I found someone who had an interest in restaurants, probably because she was so young that she hadn’t been to many. Based on her behaviors and speaking patterns, Sarah must have been a post-post Millennial. She had a vocabulary all her own and was able to chew gum, without removing it, straight through a three-course meal.

  One evening, when we were deciding on a restaurant for dinner, she mentioned Luigi’s. She said the food was sick, the chef was insane, the decor was filthy, and the specials were random. I told her I didn�
��t want to spend good money on food that might make us ill, made more likely if the chef was mentally unbalanced and the decor was in need of cleaning. I also preferred that the chef prepare specials according to a recipe rather than randomly. We did go to a restaurant that evening, but Sarah never returned my phone calls after that.

  I was fast approaching age forty, had failed to sustain any meaningful relationships, didn’t see anyone promising on the horizon, but still hadn’t reached rock bottom. That happened after I applied for a spot on The Bachelor TV show. I never received a response, so I waited outside the studio eight hours a day hoping to discuss that oversight directly with the producer. Every day for three weeks, I pestered everyone who went into and came out of the building, inquiring about the producer, until I was arrested for harassment and thrown in jail for a week.

  But miracles do happen, and soon after my incarceration ended, I finally met the woman I wanted to marry: Diane. My beleaguered mother was overjoyed and wasted no time checking out of the fertility clinic. Diane and I were married one year later, a full three months after her last homework assignment was due.

  • • •

  MARATHON MAN

  I was twenty-five years old when running a marathon became my goal. I began training at age forty-five. Some might perceive that as an absence of seriousness, but I had to leave myself sufficient time to learn about marathon training because I knew nothing about it. When I first heard the term carbo-loading, I thought it was a unique method of reloading rifles that helped the Continental Army win the Revolutionary War.

  I read extensively during those two decades, learning the importance of nutrition and hydration during exercise of long duration such as a marathon. The normal human body can store enough energy for approximately sixteen to eighteen miles of running and will often shut down or “hit the wall” at that point; hence, the importance of ingesting carbohydrates both before and during the race.

  I was determined to avoid ever hitting that wall, so immediately before my first training run, I ate a stack of pancakes smothered in maple syrup. I threw up after the first half-mile. Upon rereading that section more carefully, I noted that the pre-training or pre-race meal should be taken a few hours before starting.

  Undeterred by this minor setback, I bounded out of the house for my second training run. About three-quarters of a mile away, slightly farther than I had reached the day before, an ornery, snarling dog confronted me. How to deal with ornery, snarling dogs was Chapter Twelve of How to Train for a Marathon. I was on Chapter Eleven. Part of the dog’s irritability may have stemmed from not having eaten in a while, a hypothesis I was reluctant to test.

  I figured I could disarm him by smiling and making some cooing noises, but that only increased his surliness. This canine had mauling on his mind. Walking backward as quickly as I could without being too obvious only insulted his intelligence; he indicated such by revealing even more of his large, shapely, white fangs. I tiptoed to the street corner behind me, and once out of his sight, I sprinted home to safety. I hadn’t run that fast since my early teenage years when my Uncle Vito took me along with him to steal hubcaps from police cars.

  After concluding that dogs aren’t always man’s best friend, I suspended my training regimen for several weeks to regain my composure. When I restarted, I moved my training indoors, running several laps around my living room without missing a day. Several months later, I heard that the friendly dog had moved, so I resumed running outside, and within a year I had my mileage up to five plus miles per week. The How to Train book said I was a bit behind schedule, but I figured that in just a couple more years, I would be ready to race.

  The book also suggested that speed work (i.e., sprints) be included in one’s training regimen. The road in front of my house—flat, quiet, and about 150-yards long—was well suited for sprints, and I was eager to begin. I changed into my running gear and walked to the street where, by chance, I met my neighbor. She was a young mother, walking her infant son in a stroller, headed in the same direction as I was. We exchanged pleasantries, I took off, and nearly beat her to the end of the street. Not wishing other people to see my tortoise-like skills, I retreated to my living room to train, doing wind sprints across the entire length of the room, again without missing a day.

  At long last, race day was fewer than twenty-four hours away. I reviewed the pre-race checklist, which was burned into my memory: (1) get a good night’s sleep, (2) eat a carbohydrate-rich meal a couple of hours prior to the race, (3) have a thorough bowel movement before the race, (4) dress properly for the expected weather conditions.

  I climbed into bed early, at 9:30 p.m., and set the alarm for 5:00 a.m., three hours before race time, early enough to eat and digest a substantial pre-race meal. Two hours and 10,000 counted sheep later, I lay staring at several cracks in the ceiling. I got out of bed, ate a snack, read, and watched TV—and remained wide awake. It was well past 2:00 a.m. before the Sandman finally struck, and only two hours later, the alarm reminded me how little I had slept. I felt more like I had just run a marathon than having one to run.

  I ate my pre-race meal, headed to the bathroom for the crucial purge of the bowels, and had as much success on the toilet as I had in bed. I pushed so hard that I had to place a couple of fingers on each eyeball to prevent them from popping to the floor on the day of such an important race. So determined was I to continue trying and so intractable was my constipation that I lost track of time. Only twenty-five minutes to race time! With distended bowels, I put on my t-shirt, shorts, socks, and sneakers, dashed into my car, and drove speedily to the race site. The temperature this morning was thirty-five degrees, wind chill around twenty degrees, both of which I had failed to check because of other preoccupations.

  As we stood around the starting line waiting for the race to start, I was trying not to attract any attention, hoping no one would notice that I was the only one without sweatpants and a wool cap on this frigid morning. The noise from my chattering teeth—audible to anyone within a hundred yards—betrayed me. My cold-induced stutter made it impossible to have a lucid conversation with anyone around me. I fought to resist the onset of hypothermia, which had already begun to deaden my senses. Fortunately, my hearing was the last to go, so I was able to hear, faintly, the sound of the starting gun. Running helped me beat back the hypothermia. My fingers and toes once again became useful body parts. Nearing the two-mile marker, somewhat earlier than most people, I “hit the wall.” Compounding my loss of energy was a warning from my bowels of unfinished business. There were no portable toilets along the way, only at the starting line, so I had to either return to the start or hold it for another twenty-four miles, the latter being about as likely as Uncle Vito getting out of jail early for good behavior.

  Back to the start I went, rarely having been so glad to see a Port-o-San. The relief was palpable but short-lived as I realized I still had twenty-six miles to go. Nevertheless, I was again headed in the right direction, running well. To my surprise and smug satisfaction, I began passing several people, even if they were octogenarians and nonagenarians. Midway through the race, I spotted a fleet eighty-eight-year-old grandfather and an opportunity for me to conserve energy by running closely behind him, employing the technique of drafting.

  That worked for a while, but I suspect the benefits were minimal after I fell more than a mile behind him. Luck was on my side, though, as a second opportunity to draft—behind Myrtle, a ninety-two-year-old great-grandmother with a walker—appeared with just three miles to go, which eventually brought me to the finish line. As I crossed it, eager to know my race time, I looked for the race clock, but in vain. The race organizers had long ago packed up and gone home.

  Myrtle and I will be lodging a formal complaint.

  • • •

  CULTURE SHOCK

  I grew up in a lower-middle class, provincial neighborhood in Queens, New York, where acceptance of diversity eluded some of the residents, particularly those of my parents’ generati
on. Nevertheless, partly because of my awareness of prejudices against my own ethnic group, Italian-Americans, I was a tolerant fellow, certainly by the standards of the day. Heck, I would later make my home in Puerto Rico and marry a Puerto Rican woman. At the time, I knew only two things about Puerto Ricans:

  (1) More of them could fit into a Ford Pinto than anyone thought possible. Whenever a car of theirs pulled up to discharge its passengers, I wasn’t sure whether my mind was playing tricks on me.

  Were the same eight people rotating in and out of the car three times, or were there really twenty-four of them in there? And they could have easily squeezed in another one or two if they were willing to remove the foam dice, baby shoes, rosary beads, and Puerto Rican flags hanging from the rearview mirror.

  Their cars always shook when driving, which I first thought was because they weren’t tuned well, but subsequently realized it was caused by the sound coming from the Carnegie Hall–sized woofers in the trunk.

  (2) They wore impossibly pointy shoes, probably so they could conduct their normal business affairs in case they accidentally left their switchblades at home. When one of them asked for your wallet, they didn’t seem to respond to the word, no. Some people thought that they had difficulty understanding English, but I thought it was because their hearing was impaired from frequent rides in Pintos with giant woofers.

  So, in my late twenties and with some trepidation, I accepted my employer’s job assignment to Puerto Rico. My cultural adventure didn’t wait for my arrival on the island. It began on the flight. My fellow passengers included an aggressive-looking young man who sat two rows behind me, in handcuffs, and a semi-toothless gentleman sitting next to me who felt compelled to strike up a conversation by asking me, in broken English, how much I paid for my ticket. Finally, there was the “bring-your-pet-along” discount, which the airline must have been offering, judging by the dozens of clucking chickens on the flight.