EXIT ONLY by TERRY MAROTTA

This is what our summer has been like: We’ve all been together every weekend and sometimes it’s been great and sometimes it’s been hard. The baby is sick this weekend and though he never cries normally he sure is crying now. His mum Carrie went running and a big golf ball-sized lump popped up on the side of her knee after. (The surprise that Fate had for us all last summer was to learn that Carries has the auto-immune disease known as Rheumatoid Arthritis, this athlete, this former Crew girl and Rugby player. Last summer she could not lift a glass of water to her mouth on account of it. Now she’s almost all better thanks to the new drugs but feels – I know she feels – that her youth is over.)

That’s Old Dave with the white hair. He still has his health and is still the strongest man I know aside from John Magee, shown here bench-pressing our first baby a couple of summers ago.

That’s the new child, the little sickie on the far right.

And me, I’m taking the picture so I’m not in it. My health is good except my neck hurts all the time. I have a mental image of myself as the Cat in the Hat with my skinny neck making all this trouble. The discs are bulging forward, squeezed out of alignment like marshmallow between two squares of graham cracker. The shot they give you for this feels like cold death must feel as it zizzes instantaneously through all your ductwork but it helps for six months or so and I will be glad to have it again soon and I’m content.

The baby has found one of the cats now and is patting him and seems better for the moment anyway. I love watching the ones who are watching each other. That’s family life I guess, and I sure thank God for it.

The world looked so pretty and clean this morning I started to think I was in Disney World. Dogs were grinning from the windows of their master’s trucks and the early morning light made the distant hills look like big old lions rolling their muscles. “These two hours will pass in no time!” I thought as I rolled from Central New Hampshire over to Portland Maine.

Only then I began noticing that about every 100^th tree was infested with tent caterpillars whose webby nests look like cotton candy caught in a sandstorm.

Only then I saw a skinny old lady dressed in Barbie doll-style togs close her car window on her own dog’s chin. She did it slowly but she did it on purpose – pushed that button so fast to get herself some coffee it hit the poor thing smack under the jaw.

Only then I saw a porcupine who was worse than killed by the car that sealed its fate; I mean yeah it was dead but it also had this long red rope-looking thing coming out of its stomach. It looked like a sweater somebody decided to un-knit. It looked like a vacuum cleaner whose plug someone just pulled from the wall…

And all of this WOULD have really harshed on my mellow – until I passed a little phone-booth-sized structure up on blocks in somebody’s front yard, wooden, shingled-roofed, with the classic crescent moon carved into the door and in leaning against it a big hand-painted sign saying “For Sale By Owner.”

It was an outhouse of course but a new outhouse or a slightly used one? I was darned if I knew, but tell ya what, just the very thought of an enterprising spirit like that had me smiling the whole rest of the way to Portland.

“Hi” began the breathless email I just got. “This is Brian! I ordered your new unit and need to hear from you for confirmation on delivery date!”  So ‘Brian’ here clearly wants me to think that not only are we such pals that he needs no last name but also that I will smack my head and say “Oh my UNIT! I totally forgot I ordered it!”  Pretty cute using the word “unit” too, a generic term that applies to so many things, your conditioner, your apartment, your toupee.

Speaking of ‘rugs’, I had a six-foot-three, 230-pound hair-stylist friend I’ll call Huey. By night he wore leather chaps and chains and participated in various tableaux in which he dressed like a giant painted woman but by day he made things pretty. In the salon he was all you could ask for: he fitted wigs on hair-loss people like nobody’s business, he cried when you cried and he could do anyone’s hair living AND dead and send them to the party looking better.

Since he was bald himself  he talked a lot about his own unit. I’d go see him and ask about his day and he would treat me to such vivid descriptions of his morning rituals I felt as if I was sitting right next to him at the dressing table in his apartment - and naturally there was lots of talk about his unit, which was strictly top drawer and got more attention than most people’s pets.

I sigh to think of him. Maybe someday I’ll have a unit too and yes I DO know the word has another meaning and no I don’t contemplate sexual reassignment surgery QUITE yet BUT IF I DID – or if I were bald, hot or needed an apartment why I’d write right back to Brian here lickety-split and say “My UNIT? It’s ready for shipment? Well here’s my home address, bank account numbers and Social honey! Now you send that thing right on out, I’ll be waitin’ by the door!”

Had an MRI last night at 10pm, weirdly enough.

Now for any MRI they begin by stretching you out like a corpse, then they seal you in a sort of high-tech coffin, then subject you to the fiercest racket you can imagine.

So into my coffin I went, joking around and saying I was sure I’d just find it funny just like I did the last time…. but of course it being TEN AT NIGHT I fell dead asleep in there, causing the technician to peep in a tiny electronic voice of alarm that sounded like it was a million lifetimes away, “Don’t move!” Jeez don’t move!” Then they had to shoot the whole sequence again because being sound asleep I did move a little.

The racket IS pretty funny actually: First there’s this sort of syncopated knocking, like a kindergarten rhythm band just warming up, then six blasts of artillery fire, then a kind of electronic pocking like a person playing with one of those little wooden paddles that have rubbers ball attached to them by slender lengths of elastic.Then the whole capsule moves, with a sort of lame lurching motion, like a low-end amusement park ride. Then, it all starts again. Oh! And periodically too, a tiny image of the technician appears as a miniature angel in your coffin’s little mirror and asks, in a tiny electronic voice, if you’re OK in there.

I just had my shoes and my bikini undies on under my double johnnie. Outside, David held my strapless bar, my yellow sundress and my wedding ring which is all I walked in with. Still they kept asking me if I had any METAL on, any metal at all? On me? In me? And also, Had anyone ever shot metal into my eyes?

All I could say was No. But some guy got mad at me today reading what I wrote about our nice cat Abe and how we let the doctors cut his penis off and he called me “freak” and other mean things AND HE SURE ISN’T THE FIRST TO DO SO so really all I can say about my eyes is, Not yet (and by the way here they are):

Yesterday was the birthday of Crisco, Crisco being LARD , pure pig fat, and right next door to mercury in terms of being in the doghouse these days but I tell ya what: you want to make a really good fine pie you’d best dig out the Crisco.

It was also Chinese Lovers Day, Editor Appreciation Day, and National Best Friends Day, though I didn’t make a pie or love any Chinese people either. I did get to thinking about Chinese Handcuffs which like a lot of things (Iraq, Viet Nam) are easy enough to get INTO but a whole harder to get OUT of.

I didn’t do much about National Best Friends Day either except annoy the socks off my designated best friend/spouse talk about your Chinese Handcuffs. He was annoyed because he had JUST TOLD me that TVs with DVD players in them suck on account of how the DVD part breaks and then were are you and what did I do but directly disregard his advice and go buy that very thing. He hates it when people fail to take full advantage of his sagacity. Especially when it’s his moron wife who should know better but what can he do? Even if on nine levels I test his patience like you wouldn’t believe on that tenth level he finds me irresistible. (Smug smiley face goes here.)

But I guess I DID celebrate the day a little cone to think of it in the sense that I file my column on that day of the week and so appreciate my editors afresh on account of the crazy mistakes I bad make in my typing, especially right at the last second before I press “send.” Once I was trying to tell about this teacher who liked the kids and was liked in return but what did I end up writing instead ? “She licks the kids and the kids lick her” and no spell-checking program on earth would ever find that gaffe. It takes an editor, right? And so for the zillionth time THANKS GUYS and here’s to boo-boos all around. Now let’s eat us some pig fat and catch some nice Olympic swimming!

Here’s the pig fat: OH ya!

OK, you want to know why we resent you guys? We resent you because all the best creativity gets directed to your needs instead of ours. Take the names of the various sexual aids: YOU get a name like ‘Viagra’, which sounds like vitality with a little agriculture thrown to help sow those life-givin’ oats of yours. You get ‘Levitra,’ a name deriving from the Latin word for ‘rise’. I see the Levitra ads and all I can think of is the ladder on a fire truck cranking slowly and sturdily upward. You get ‘Cialis’ which sounds like “See Alice,” because there’s just no TELLING what Alice might be moved to do in the face of your powerful display of manhood!

Now look at the names of the products they have for us. Is there a ‘Honey Blossom’? Or a ‘Heaven’s Gate’? Or a ‘Nectar of the Goddess”? No way babe. What they have for us is something called  ‘Vagifem’, a sipping straw-size syringe-like thingy that carries at its tip a tiny payload of estrogen to be catapulted boink! against the cervix and left there to do what it can do.

Vagifem, Gad! Can there BE a worse word?

Plus men also get perky jingles like the “Viva Viagra!” one. They get romantic commercials where chicks soaking in hot tubs reach out to link pinkies with these about-to-be-proven-tireless partners, commercials where some pliant gal with shoulder-length hair swoons prettily in the arms of her big strong man, EVEN THOUGH HE’S IN THE  POWDER-BLUE TUX HE WORE TO HIS PROM 30 YEARS AGO HAR-DE-HAR-HAR. Even at that he still seems not at all dorky but cool and fun and ironic, a life-of-the- party guy who’s not about to let a little e.d. get him down!

All this do guys get, and we get …….Vagifem -  and why? Because they think we’re lightweights? Sissies? Fems ourselves?  Just a bunch of fems with vaginas? And who named THAT body part you ask? Who but the men of Ancient Rome and guess what it means in Latin? It means “scabbard,” as in the sheath for a sword.

Yep, sheaths to their swords are our bodies to them, holsters to their little pistols, this part of us that is most complex and intricate through which all must travel to get here, this wondrous part named and defined strictly in relation to the male, walk-ins welcome,  step right up, open 24 hours a day, we’re here to serve ya.

I say we rename THEIR products with the same unromanticized bluntness and how’s this for starters:  How’s  ‘Penissimus Maximus’ and the slogan can be “It’s Scrotally Awesome”?

Little kids are so sweet the way they repeat their parents’ phrases. A while ago I was sitting with a little girl two who really REALLY wanted the toy that this seven-month-old beside her was clutching, maybe because it wasn’t even a toy so much as totally delightful AID TO RELAXATION, a sort of wee vibrating robot that looks like this:

She just WANTED this gizmo. Bad. And so said “I’m sure the baby would be happy to share that with me.” She’d heard this phrase from her parents evidently and decided to give it a try -  and just like that the thing was buzzing away in her hand and she was smilin’ to beat the band.

The trick in life, children,  is to manipulate reality with words, just like she did: say a thing and hope that the saying will make it so. I know it’s a scam I personally have been tryin’ to run for like 50 years now.

But what would happen if little kids turned the tables and used those powerful suggestions on us their keepers? We say to them “Shall I check your hair now?” meaning ‘Shall I drag this painful metal-toothed comb through your tender scalp looking for nits?’ We NEVER say “Would you like a bath tonight or should we just say the hell with it?”, NEVER ask “Would you LIKE me to find the tenderest hairs at the  nape of your neck and rake my fingers through them?” Oh no. It’s all false choices we offer them, like those personality tests that ask if you’d rather have your nostril hairs pulled out one by one or be thrown from a third floor window.  “Should we take the lice-comb to you first or start the evening’s activities by scouring your bottom with infernally stinging baby wipes WHILE GRASPING YOUR TINY ANKLES AND HOISTING THEM HIGH ABOVE YOUR HEAD? “

What I worry about is when the tables turn at which point “Will that be paper or plastic?” won’t exactly be the choice that they’re offering us.  More like “Mom? Dad? Will that be the pillow over your face or an overdose of Nyquil?” when we’re all 110 and they’re 80 and sick to death of us.

In fact what I think is we should fork over all our foot massagers, head ticklers and heating pads RIGHT NOW – and  maybe, just maybe, they’ll let us live.

Is there a Poltergeist at this vacation house I’m wondering? Because two things: (1) I corked this bottle of wine and the cork kept popping out – shooting out hard and flying five, six feet in the air; and also (2) there was this thing with my TV set….. We had a rainstorm the other night, see, that was so severe it trapped me in the supermarket. FOR AN HOUR AND A HALF I was the only dope in the place.. “Dude, the Parking lot is a TOILET!” said one of the kids working there as he looked out at the rain drumming and the wind howling. It was too: a world of water was circling this one large drain just like when you flush. Another kid finally went and got me an umbrella so to help get me to my car without drowning but the water went all the way to my calves as I fought my way there and then home.

Then when I finally got there, well let’s just say I’ve OFTEN thought if Old Dave were ever hit by lightning he probably wouldn’t notice; at least he wouldn’t react in a big way. And he looked ok, meaning he wasn’t all googly-eyed and radiating, but SOMETHING sure as heck happened here because: The computer is history. Ditto two TVs. Plus, the cable is out. AND,  the phones are dead.

It’ll cost us big to replace this stuff if we replace it all and I just couldn’t deal with that thought right then. I kept thinking “If I can just sit down in front of this last TV that still at least turns ON and if I can get its DVD player to work, I’ll be OK.”  Because I had such HOPES for this vacation week – about how I was going to watch all these episodes of The Wire and finally file all the family photos from 2001 on. I was so hoping the week would be like that. It’s what I pictured all summer long: the peace, the quiet, the chance to sort through things and watch some fine drama uninterrupted. (sigh) I had such hope…

So I poured myself some of that feisty wine, popped in the DVD of Episode 5 Season 3 of The Wire and well, see for yourself: the RIGHT hand part of every shot appears on the LEFT hand side of the screen, while the LEFT hand part appears on the RIGHT so you have to mentally rearrange what you’re seeing like someone with dyslexia does (and this happens whatever DVD you put in.)  Also, there’s this one giant black bar that runs vertically down the screen, and another that runs horizontally across it so that only about 60% of the picture is visible…. See?

The TV is in our bedroom and in this shot below as you can see by the reflections on the screen but here’s what’s eerier still – even more eerie than that wine popping its cork every ten minutes. In fact It’s as if the TV can READ MY MIND because here’s what appeared, black bars and all just as I snapped the picture:

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I did: I had such hope for this vacation… And now I have some tingly fear besides.

I feel grouchy. I just drove ANOTHER hundred miles to get back to my real house during this my vacation week because this dumb fancy phone of mine broke and they had a new one waiting for me – IF I came home to fetch it and I’m sorry I did – because the foolish NEW phone turned out to also be so defective I couldn’t even open the battery compartment and charge it up and had to spend 45 minutes on the line with some guy in Texas at midnight. And now here I am at the lake again forced to hang around the front door like some cocker spaniel all day so that when they DO go to deliver the thing they can get the signature which they absolutely require … And I wouldn’t mind but see the SUN just came out here and who wants to be inside  waiting for some dumb doorbell to ring under those circumstances? You want to be OUTSIDE and I don’t care what they say about sunhats and the bad moles and a bulging left-cheek gland due to right wing melanoma, when I’m here and it’s my vacation week and the sun is shining I’m like this little guy here; I want to be out there on the deck too, just CATCHIN’ THEM RAYS !

Old Ronnie Reagan used to tell the story of the optimistic child who on Christmas morning finds a pile of manure in his room and excitedly cries, “There’s a pony in here somewhere!”

He was an optimist himself, old President Pompadour and I’m one too. An optimist and a romantic. Wasn’t it my notion that our seven-month-pregnant girl would just LOVE a 1500-mile trip by train to Florida which turned out to nearly put her in the hospital? “The sun is coming out, I can tell!” I’m always chirping in the midst of hellish downpours. Or, “Look at that lovely lone hawk tending its young!”- and it turns out to be a vulture eviscerating a bunny.

Yesterday on the highway I spotted two horse trailers up ahead and entered a whole waking dream in which I saw again my horse-riding days at Camp Fernwood: pictured the warm flanks of the beasts as we rested out little knees against them; the feel of leather and horseflesh; the exalted pride I felt when I learned to sit a canter and leave no daylight at all between bottom and saddle.

I kept almost catching up to these two trailers, though they rode on well ahead of me, disappearing always over the edge of that next hill. Lovely roans and palominos, I pictured. Nickering and swaying I all but heard and all but saw, and imagined those muscular haunches.

I got to where I thought I could smell them even. Thought I could just glimpse their manes flowing out in the breeze; their wonderful fly-flicking tails – until after about an hour when I caught up with them both and they weren’t horse trailers at all. They were two flatbed trucks carrying eight Porta-Potties.

Porta-Potties!  just like the one that naughty kids pushed onto my car the winter before last on New Year’s Eve! Porta-Potties, dang it all!

And then, double-dang, if it didn’t start pouring out, and all I could think of was me at 59 years of age, old TT, and one saucy song from camp days too: “And there was Grandma (ba da da DUM) Swingin’ on the Outhouse door!”