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  And now we return to the second part of Suzy Soro's Chapter One in her unreleased book, All the Bad Sex I’ve Had, a very, very, very long book.
When last we left the story, Suzy answered the phone and it was her friend, Doré, saying she had killed her cat. Not really, but Doré is one of those types that blows everything out of proportion. Oh, the cat was dead, but Doré putting salt on her food once hadn't done it. Anyway, Suzy shared the story of her dead Yorkie's spirit coming back to her a week after he died. Her grandmother, her stepmother. They all stopped by after dying. Suzy was trying to comfort Doré by telling her that maybe her Princess would come back for a visit sometime. The conversation was going nowhere and Suzy made up a fake phone call to get Doré off the phone ... - F. Lawrence Caslin
All the Bad Sex I’ve Had, a very, very, very long book (Part 2) Los Angeles is a town where people are always out of work and yet no one is ever home. It would now take a Herculean effort on my behalf to track down someone I actually wanted to talk to. Between cell phones, pagers, voice mail, answering services, answering machines, three-way calling, call forwarding and Spanish speaking maids, I could usually find someone, although the Spanish maids liked to mess with your head and just say 'Meesis no home' over and over until you hung up. The split second I learn Spanish the first phrase I'm going to learn is Fuck You. I have a friend in the Midwest who doesn't have call waiting or an answering machine or voice mail. I yell at her all the time to get at least one of them, but she says technology is going too fast and she longs for a simpler time. Yes, for God's sake, let's get out the butter churn, throw it into the covered wagon and head over to the quilting bee. She doesn't have a cell phone either but I can tolerate that since cell phones are just plain annoying, mine included. The only time they come in handy is when you and a friend are shopping at Wal-Mart and one of you gets lost.
The instruction booklet for my cell phone has eighty-four pages. It might actually dust and do dishes, but I wouldn't know since I'm not about to read those eighty-four pages anytime soon. My home phone line is complicated enough. I have MCI, which is hooked up to my Delta Frequent flier program and I get five miles for every dollar spent. If I call Shanghai every day for six years, I'll get a round trip ticket to Cleveland. And if I use MCI's online service, I get one dollar off per month on my bill, only there goes sixty free miles a year on Delta. I could always fly American, which merged with T.W.A., thereby boosting my frequent flier mileage to just one hundred and thirty six miles under the twenty five thousand miles required for a free trip. But for just one hundred and twenty five dollars I can still turn them all in and get a round trip ticket from San Francisco to Berkeley or hook the phone lines up to Blockbuster's new program so I can get one out of every four DVD rentals free. Only I hate DVD's because I don't care what went on behind the scenes during filming, what scenes didn't make the final cut and the alternate endings that the studio hated but you loved. I never want to hear what M. Night Shyamalan has to say about anything at anytime for any reason unless it involves starring me in his next movie or why his middle name is 'Night'. Yes, I know I don't have to watch those special bonus features but what was wrong with VHS again? Maybe I'll stop yelling at my friend in the Midwest.
I left five messages for non pet owners and waited in bumper to bumper traffic for someone to call me back. Finally I heard the first few bars of Wild Thing. Okay, so I lied to Doré about downloading a ring tone.
"Hello? Oh; hi." It was The Dentist. The man who I gave my phone number to twelve minutes into a divorce party instead of waiting the thirty-four minutes I should have waited. A divorce party is the latest pickup spot in Los Angeles because everyone here is divorced but you don't have to be divorced to attend. You just have to know someone who is and that's about every other person. Meanwhile, The Dentist was not one of the five people I had called. Why do I never look at my caller I.D.?
We were at a lovely house in Pacific Palisades with a panoramic view of the Pacific Ocean and an infinity pool that appeared to drop down into it. The hostess had won this lottery in her most recent divorce and decided to celebrate with a party. The Dentist told me he had been rejected from medical school, as had most dentists. I didn't know that and I didn't really care. I could still introduce him as a doctor and that was really all that mattered. And even though people hate dentists because they can scrape through to the brain stem via your molars I would just tell people how incredibly gentle he was.
I stared at him as he talked and wished I could have been attracted to him. He had traveled extensively, read prodigiously, scuba dived remarkably, played piano exquisitely and had more adverbs attached to his accomplishments than anyone I knew. This was not the guy who would take you to El Pollo Loco even if his car ran out of gas as he was driving across their parking lot and he hadn't eaten in three weeks.
He was tall and balding and his body was soft whereas I had the body of an Olympian, if you squinted from across a room and weren't wearing your glasses. And as much as I knew that he was the type of man I would like to be attracted to, I knew I couldn't have sex with someone who looked like him. Unless of course we were on the Caribbean Island and one of the questions was Could You Have Sex with an Unattractive Dentist? and then I would have to say yes just to win that week. The worst for me was that there was no click, that elusive, indescribable moment when you both know you have to fuck each other. But even though there was no click, I was so desperate that I reasoned that maybe it was better to have something in common with a troll than nothing in common with a vibrator.
He had declined the platters of sushi being passed around at the party by out of work actors while I took six pieces. Hmmm, no sushi? In LA? Possible bad breakup with an Asian girl in the past.
And as I mentally practiced saying the words, 'I'd love to go out with you' without grimacing, he mentioned his wife. Almost thirty-four minutes after we met, and a full twenty-two minutes after I'd given him my phone number and picked out Pratesi sheets and Limoges china in my mind.
"My wife has Mad Cow disease," The Dentist said. Okay, I was going to just walk away after he mentioned his wife, but Mad Cow? I was all in.
"Don't look so horrified; it wasn't from eating meat," he added.
"Well if it wasn't from meat, how did she get it?" Oh please don't say 'sushi', although then wouldn't it have been called Mad Fish Disease?
"They're not sure."
"Is it…?"
"Contagious? I don't think so, she's been dying for four years and I don't have it."
"How many years does it take to die from Mad Cow?" I asked.
"About seven to eight."
"Does she recognize you?"
"It's not Alzheimer's," he added, like he was, after Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, the big expert on death and dying, "but she does wear diapers, so they have that in common."
"It must be awful to watch someone you love die."
"I'm over it. I'm ready to get on with my life, if you know what I mean." Good grief, he was cruising for the future Mrs. Mad Cow Dentist. I suddenly got one of my 'party migraines' and said I just had to go home. And now here he was on the phone four days later. When am I going to learn to not give out my number until the man is on his knees proposing?
"So, what's been going on?"
"Oh, nothing much."
"How's that migraine?"
"Still got it."
I could see it would soon be time for another fake call.
"Have you seen a doctor about it?"
"Yeah, not much they can do about them."
"I've heard there are some new techniques in acupuncture that can relieve them long term."
"Really, like what?" Seriously, did I just ask him that? A question about the cure for a fake migraine? What was wrong with me? And somewhere in Beverly Hills adjacent, Doré was making out her will because she thought she killed her cat and I hung up on her? |
Suzy Soro
