EXIT ONLY by TERRY MAROTTA

I used to think my mom was crazy the way she’d wait ‘til we were in the car on our way someplace to put on her nail polish She never wore it otherwise. Then she’d light up a cigarette and there’s my memory of that old ribbon of highway: the car windows closed, the smell of cigarette smoke and nail polish, and us trundling along in the slow lane for one solid hour.

Didn’t she know it would smudge? I used to wonder. Why apply nail polish just then? Or when the party was at our house why put on nail polish ten minutes before the guests  arrived?

I could never figure it out but there she’ be in her usual spot at the kitchen table with the nail file tucked just under the toaster tray and the bottles of polish crowded in close by her ashtray.

And she was no kind of fancy lady. If you noticed her hands at all you only noticed they were strong – so strong she could wring out a facecloth in a way that made you sorry for the facecloth.

She never dated after her marriage more or less evanesced 18 months in, so she wasn’t doing it for a man. And God knows we kids never gave her a compliment; we were too busy holed up in the attic talking Premature Burial.

So why?

I didn’t understand until last night that she did it for herself, when I, no fancy lady either, started putting on nail polish half asleep, in the bed, at ten minutes past midnight.

Mine was called Mirage as against her Cherries in the Snow; and there was no cigarette smoke involved as far as I can recall.  But I fell asleep five minutes after I applied it so rise today to find nails looking like ten tiny waffles with the imprint of the sheets.

I don’t care. I did it for me in the last eight minutes of waking and it made me feel great – so great I’m smiling big – and lookin’ around right now for a couple of facecloths of my own  to strangle. So once again thanks Mom in your old 1950s car for helping me all the way from Heaven to keep on truckin’!

I’m a baby. Also I guess kind of spoiled because this rental house was actually nice in a way.All we needed to do was not LOOK in the sex bedrooms or the closet with the naked baby dolls; not take notice of the birds swooping through the living room or the bird-poop on the kitchen counters. Not think about the fact that the bathroom doors didn’t close or the bedspreads all had this nasty waxy feel to them.

We just had to not take note of the highly poisonous lizard ten feet from the pool which  in any case we couldn’t use because its heater was broken the whole time and it was in the 30s at night.

I showed just the bullet hole and some of the crappy busted stuff last time and here’s more along these lines:

But some of what was there was nice:  you could have a nice bath, though not in private.

You could listen to the ghost piano (See last post by clicking here for that spooky piano feature.)

And you could always could sit on the patio – if you had your coat on-  and forget all about the bedspreads

Really I guess the trick was to be like our little guys and just decide to have fun anyway and that’s what we did. We couldn’t sleep. We couldn’t relax in the the bathroom. But we sure enough laughed our heads off the whole time – which I think is all that kept the BATS  from settling in our hair.

two of our party who loved the place no matter what

I think maybe this rental house is where Boogie Nights was filmed – not the sex parts or Roller Girl’s scenes or the one in the men’s room when Mark Wahlberg looks down inside his underpants but the part where this drug lord in his bathrobe is brandishing an automatic weapon and there’s loud discordant music that just won’t STOP.

Yup, this stucco palace high in the desert hills feels like that scene.

The living room is the size of a hotel lobby, which is nice but the basement wall is kicked in and the fridge’s ice and water delivery system is broken with the wires all hanging down.

The dead moths are still dropping on our food from the busted ceiling panel and also: the fuse box in the basement’s yanked apart, the pool’s heater is broken so the pool is so cold it makes your legs go eggplant-purple the minute you try to step into it. There are no clocks, and no blankets and not a single table lamp either so no reading in bed but only lying there waiting for the thugs to pull up outside.

The ceramic “decorations” have all been broken, then badly repaired with fat blobs of glue coming out the cracks (see?)

Plus there’s an electric piano that keeps playing “Winter Wonderland” and a bullet hole in the front hall mirror and finally a secret room in the basement that the kids are calling “Gimps’ room” but that’s another movie.

That’s “Pulp Fiction.”

And now all I can say is Where is Samuel L Jackson when you need him?

happy vacation. Now DUCK!

When you get yourself west, you almost think you dreamed the dreary east, with the journey from Atlantic to Mexican border so long you feel as if you made it by covered wagon – covered wagon or else the long tunnel-passage of dying.

I wake up in Tucson today, where my whole family has come to visit David’s big brother Toby and all the places our girls Carrie and Chris came to love when Carrie did grad school here six years ago.

They love this land of cactus, snake and bobcat. A year ago when we came out here Carrie said “We’re totally retiring here! “

“Way out here? But can I come visit at least? “ I plaintively squeaked.

She gave me that mildly pitying look all kids give their parents. “Mum: you’ll be dead.”

But we’re not dead yet. old Dave and I. We woke today feeling like survivors,  yesterday’s hardships all but forgotten: the ten kiddie movies left behind on Plane One, the ear infection meds left on Plane Two, the agitation of the one-year-old, made frantic by fatigue who lurched ceaselessly up and down the aisles, his little head like a toy balloon drifting at armrest level from fore to aft and back again.

We got here at 10pm and it’s three whole hours earlier, Arizona being the one state in the nation that says a big No Thanks to Daylight Savings. We grownups didn’t get to bed till 1:00 since the AC seemed to be busted here in this rental and dead moths keep dropping from the busted panel of the kitchen light fixture and the last renter’s uncollected garbage is stinking to high heaven in the garage.

“Will you be OK ?” I asked poor Carrie as she stumbled toward their bed, as exhausted as Chris is from having held a frantic baby for at least five of our nine hours flying and who, in the best of times has insomnia.

“I’ll be fine,” she sighed. “Maybe I’ll die in the night,”

But I guess she didn’t die either. I heard them all rattling around in the dark a few hours ago, the little ones up at 5:00 with the jetlag and by 6:00 they were all four of them off in the rental car, I assume in search of breakfast items.

As soon as I unpack here and find my camera I’ll take a picture of these mountains with their thick tan folds like wrinkles on a bloodhound adn whoops! here comes that rental car full of our dear ones now! time to rise and shine and make some pancakes!

The snow is melting but not fast enough. You still can’t walk up north here we come on weekends. The only melt is around people’s docks where the aqautherm heaters they put in to keep a pool of open water so the docks don’t break up in all the ice.

Otherwise: tundra.

The cats can’t believe it. They go out on the porch and get no farther. There is no vegetation to sniff, no rich earth to dig in after using it for the purpose the Cat Gods intended.

So they come back inside with me and together we climb to the room over the garage, the house’s highest point. In one direction: a gritty driveway. In the other: more tundra.

There is however a little balcony off this room too small for more than a single chair in summer.  Both cats are out on it now, noses pointed southward. They lift their chins. They sniff the air. They smell something I am missing. Oh for a nose like a cat and a cat’s eyes too when March has us all stuck in neutral!

Omar Sheriff Porn Star? I thought he was a porn star anyway when I saw the email with that name on the top, an obvious riff on the name of actor Omar Shariff. “Oh right,” I thought, “click on the link and here’s some guy in nothing but a pair of chaps and a cowboy hat.”

But I was wrong:

“My name is Omar Sheriff, a merchant in Dubai who has been diagnosed with Esophageal Cancer that defiled all forms of medicine so that I have only  a few months to live acc  ording to medical experts.”

Ok first of all I like the “acc!” – A nice touch for a guy with throat problems. And who hasn’t wanted to ‘defile’ all forms of medicine? Write graffiti on the examining room walls? Stick “Kick Me” signs to the doctors’ backs?

“Though I am very rich, I was never generous. I was always hostile to people and only focused on my siness as that was the only thing I cared for.”

Well sure but sinus trouble is terrible! Who can blame him for focusing on it?

Of course he regrets all this today:

“Now that God as called me, I have willed most of my  assets to my family and friends. So far, I have also distributed money to some charity organizations but the last of my money which no one knows of is the HUGE CASH DEPOSIT OF TWENTY FOUR MILLION DOLLARS that I have with a Security Company in Europe for safe-keeping. I will want you to help me collect this, deposit and disburse it to charity organizations so please send me a mail to indicate if you will assist me in this disbursement of this money, 20% of which I have set aside for you. While I await to hear from you, remain blessed. Signed, Omar Sheriff.”

And he gives his email as youareasucker@hotmail.com and OK yes I changed that just in case some of you crazy kids try clicking on it and get swept up by who-knows-what. I myself however am going to write him right now and, since he’s so rich, ask him to just jet on over here and leave my  cut in small bills under the porch.  And who knows, maybe when I click there really will be a picture of some young cowboy in chaps or not.

It’s not that Americans scorn the French, we love the French, where would kissing be without them? It’s just that when Pee Wee Bush was trying to get us to turn on them for not supporting his Big Adventure in Iraq he tapped into one of our deepest inferiority complexes: we’re all pretty sure we sound like fools when we try to speak their language.

Dave and I speak French with a Boston accent, as we found out when we went to Paris once. Me I thought I was so great in languages in high school (“98 for the year in Latin, 96 in French!” I’d boast to my few (and where’s the surprise there?) friends but when I GOT OVER TO PARIS I could only speak the language in a way that made them fall over laughing: “A thousand pardons is it that I might purchases some of these purchases why not because?”  And, “Excuse me if you please step on your foot could tell me perhaps how many monies these object are costing?” – And then when they answered – after they finally stopped howling – I could not understand a single word.

Lucky for us, Old Dave, who would speak French with a Boston accent if he’d agree to so much as open his mouth and try, saved the day because he seems to be set on ‘receive; where I am set on ‘transmit’. He understood everything they said the whole week and conveyed it all to me, so I could try composing my next baroque utterance.

We had a great time anyway, mostly because in Paris all they do is sit in cafés drinking the good coffee in the morning and the good red wine at night while smoking cigarettes and laughing at Death and there sure as hell is none o’ that timidity and guilt we have here in Les États-Unis I can tell you.

Sigh. Now I want to go back – brush up on the vocab and see if the strengthening dollar I read about in today’s paper might permit another trip sometime down the line.

‘Pamplemousse’ means ‘grapefruit’, I know that, and ‘douche’ means nothing more than ‘shower’ and it makes me furious every time I think how it got twisted into some nasty slangy insult here. And as for ‘Nescafé’ that means ‘I never-did-learn-to-make-coffee-so-here’s a fake-French-word-to-go-with-your-instant, BABE.’

So I was excited, see, because I got such great flowers – plus FOUR gorgeous pots – for my birthday. The pots came  from our niece Joanie Marotta, 23 next month, and they were so pretty I decided to bank them all together on the kitchen counter  by ‘all’ meaning One, the begonia and calla-lily plants, from my two girls who we mistreated in childhood by sitting on the low ends of  their see-saws so they could never get down see above ha ha; Two, the lovely purple blooms from Dodson who is like son to us and his bride Veronica; and Three some basil which I bought so the cats could have some normal greens to nibble on after they got totally drunk eating a catnip plant

… and snapped the picture – AND was just congratulating myself on having such a fine eye and being such an altogether awesome person when I noted that my coffee was no longer hot. Well, the carafe is metal I reasoned and so put it on one burner for the quick fix; then forgot it and wandered to the other side of the kitchen to check on the cat’s food when whoosh! Another FIRE AT THE MAROTTA HOUSE which smelled really awful the way burned plastic does natch but LOOKED so great I almost took a picture before extinguishing it.

I did extinguish it first but here’s the aftermath.

Funny, right? Stalactites coming down even!

Finally just for more beauty is Joanie, as pretty as the little crocuses with their pointy bishops’ hats just now trying to struggle up through the snow:

So Enjoy the Day and remember: everything is funny til you die (and then of course there’ll be jokes at the funeral.

I’m sitting in the little corner bedroom where our babies all slept and the snow is coming down hard. Dave fell back asleep waiting for the snowplow and the cat has spread herself out like a fur stole at my side here. The house is so quiet I can hear the clock ticking all the way down in the kitchen.

I have to file my column today and compose the entire ABC newsletter. I feel like the editor of a small town paper, gathering the news, taking the pictures, writing the stories, doing the paste-up but it’s such a great organization and I am in love with all eight boys that have come to our town as part of it.

I also have to enter the annual column and bogging contests conducted by the National Society of Newspapers today and  check on Uncle Ed who is 88 and hurts a lot when the weather is wet, then fight my way to the car and bring it to the service station because last night as I drove down Washington Street hoping to go to the grand opening of the brand-new Next Door Theater there was a loud BANG! and my window disappeared. I screamed. I thought I’d been shot, and even circled back to see if I saw glass on the street but no. The window, frozen shut with yesterday’s snow, had suddenly let go and disappeared down into the door.

It was a mighty cold ride home and it‘ll be a colder ride to the service station with no window and all this snow and the winds gusting to 50 miles an hour – and that’s if we can even get out of the driveway.

But all this effort is for later. For now all is quiet. The cat and the husband are faintly snoring, the coffee is perking, the clock is  ticking and I am writing to you.