Wake Up and Smell the Shit Page 2

  As my contact lenses defogged, I wandered the rows, pushing Try Me! buttons, feeling Lifelike! fleshy objects, and whiffing open tubes of gelatinous substances that smelled like room-service breakfast. And then I turned a corner and—whoa!—my eyeballs zeroed in on the most magnificent machine ever invented since the front loader. I approached it with terror and awe. It was a gigantic, multi-dialed, toggled and gauged, two-foot-long, 220-volt (with step-down transformer for the U.S.), lights-blinking, needles-pulsating, many-and-gloriously-attachmented, Frankenstein’s monster of a female orgasm machine, named, with just enough machismo to underscore its lumbering good looks, Kapitein Cyclops.4 I don’t like using a lot of hyperbole in my writing, but in this case I don’t know any other way of describing this monument to futtocks-penetrating brilliance. It’s an injustice to call it a mere vibrator. It may as well have been sculpted from a single block of marble, a La Pietà of cumdom, the G-spot of the Sistine Chapel. Or, since we were, after all, in Amsterdam, a Night Watch of vaginal bliss. I don’t know if “vaginal bliss” and “Night Watch” have ever been used analogously before, and I don’t care. Night Watch was Rembrandt’s greatest painting, and it has its own room in the Rijksmuseum (Stadhouderskade 42—leave yourself a whole day), and it takes up an entire wall, and it is a picture of a bunch of seriously randy guys trying to force their way into an Amsterdam sex shop.

  When De Maximus’s clerk gave me the price in guilders, I didn’t even bother to calculate. I just handed her my wallet. She said, “It also comes in a diesel model. No problems with electric conversion, ja?” Kapitein Cyclops was an entire goddamn power plant. If you ran out of fuel, all you had to do was press him to your lawn, and in 15 minutes heavy crude would be gushing.

  “Optional carrying case with wheels,” she pointed out. “Easy on your back, ja?”

  “I’ll take it.” I checked my watch. “Hurry.”

  She hefted it into the case, swiped my credit card—I crossed my fingers—and when it was accepted thanked me for my wise vibratory purchase.

  “No,” I assured her. “Thank you.”

  And off we rolled, the Kapitein and I, pressing against the North Sea wind, back to the Anne Frank museum, where you-know-who was just exiting. “Where the hell were you?” she demanded. She looked down at my new suitcase. “What’s up with that?”

  “I have a tremendous surprise for you,” I said. “Something to cheer you up after your depressing ordeal involving the sadism of the Reich.”

  Her arm stiffened and twitched.

  “A really, really, really big surprise,” I assured her. “A huge, enormous surprise. A surprise that will have you shouting my name.”

  “On what historical basis?”

  “You won’t be sorry.”

  “If it doesn’t involve vodka, I’m already sorry.”

  Fortunately our hotel (Schiller Hotel, Rembrandtsplein 26-36—expensive but a Green Key winner for its environmental awareness and sustainable practices, if you give a damn, which I don’t) sported a lobby bar (Café Schiller—popular and noisy), and we stopped for what I hoped would be a quick one that turned out to be an excruciatingly slow one, but nevertheless with me smirking the whole time and trying not to look at the rolling suitcase.

  The blonde’s eyes narrowed. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “I love you.”

  “Are you drunk?”

  “Intoxicated with love.”

  “Forget it. I’m exhausted.”

  “No problemo.”

  “Since when?”

  Our typical pillow talk. This time, though, I had her. Lutherans may think ahead, but that’s only presuming they’ve never laid peepers on Kap’n Cy. Once I had wifey in the room and lugged that 68 pounder out of its broadside, all her thinking ahead would be as useless as the Graf Spee against Allied torpedo bombers.

  And so upstairs we went, my sweet Frau Grendel—suspiciously, if I wasn’t mistaken—insisting I walk ahead of her. I unlocked the door and waved her in.

  “You go first,” she said. “And no funny business.”

  Inside, I asked her if she wanted to slip into something comfortable—for example, the bed.

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  “I just thought, you know—snowy night in a romantic city…”

  “I already told you, I’m tired. After a certain point, it’s harassment.”

  So I unzipped the spinner and unveiled Kapitein C.

  She made a wounded-hamster sound. “What the…hell…is that?”

  “Say Hoe maakt u het 5 to our new best friend.”

  She reached for the phone. “I’ll show you my new best friend.”

  “Calling for champagne?” I asked.

  “Neun ein ein.” 6

  Which is why we came home early without speaking to each other in any language, and why when we got back to Illinois she told me she never wanted to see my stupid face again and do myself a favor and get help. And also why, a couple of weeks later, I got a letter from her attorney, Müller.

  I soon had half the money I’d worked for my whole life and hated my ex very much. I never started out wanting to despise the Nazi bitch, but I see how these things work. Sometimes I would dream that she was flying back to Amsterdam for a jolly night out at the Anne Frank House, and at 30,000 feet the plane blew up, and she fell into a bubbling volcanic crater. As a veteran travel writer, I know there really are no volcanoes between Illinois and Holland, but this is how psychotic dreams work, so don’t write to the publisher.

  The first time I had that dream, I woke up in a cold sweat, realizing what I had just done to the 200 other, presumably innocent, airplane passengers. I got out of bed, made myself some crackers and Velveeta (I could no longer afford cheese), and decided that those other passengers were probably all newly divorced blondes who also deserved to die choking on sulfuric fumaroles. So I went back to bed and self-hypnotized myself to sleep by imagining my ex waking up in a Twilight Zone episode in which every women’s shoe store sells at only wholesale prices, so she goes insane and jumps off the Neiman Marcus roof but instead of splatting on Michigan Avenue, lands in Gaza wearing the gold Star of David I had bought her for her birthday and that she returned to me the next day with the note, “What the hell are you sprinkling on your matzo?”

  The main point here being, not all European vacations are ideal. Sometimes they start out sherry-pooled bisque but end up flesh-dissolving magma. As an eternal optimist, though, I tend to think things usually work out for the best. For example, my cat seriously loving Velveeta.

  As another example: In the divorce, I lost my house, car, IRA, dental floss, caffeine-free Diet Coke, furniture, sheets, pillows, blankets, books, wristwatch, other cat, dishes, silverware, and all my tools. I felt the way Czechoslovakia must have felt in 1938. I moved into a neighborhood that features drive-up crack houses, Meetup.com pimp movie nights, all-night slamming doors, and hallway-roaming pit bulls. And sure enough, every morning I woke up and smelled the shit. On the plus side, though, I got to keep Kapitein Cyclops, so, really, I consider it a fair tradeoff. Here’s why.

  One day I was watching Nancy Pelosi being interviewed on The View while eating Pringles. I, Gary, not Nancy, was eating Pringles. What she, Pelosi, was doing was talking without moving her face, like Jeff Dunham’s Akhmed the Dead Terrorist. So I was already frightened when my phone rang, causing me to jump and launch the Pringles onto my cat, which she happens to like almost as much as Velveeta.

  At first I didn’t want to answer because I figured it was a collection agency, but on the outside chance it was my father calling to tell me my siblings had all suddenly died, and I was now his sole heir, I picked it up.

  “Gary?” came the cheerful woman’s voice.

  “Never heard of him.”

  “You sound like him! I bet you’re him!”

  “I told your boss I’m doing the best I can,” I lied. “We worked out a payment plan,” I lied some more.<
br />
  “This is Lois from O’Hare Customs! Remember me?! Last December?!”

  “Customs? Lois?”

  “You were returning from Amsterdam?” She lowered her pitch. “Mr. Grumpy Face.”

  I tried to think back on what laws I might have broken.

  “I’m the short redhead with big ears.”

  “Lois!”

  “Gary!”

  “Lois!”

  “I got your number off the entry doc. I hope you don’t mind. I think you, um, might know why?”

  Indeed I did. Yes, sirree. If she was the short redhead with big ears I was recalling correctly, she had made quite a fuss over one particular item I was bringing back to the good ol’ U.S. of A. The short, big-eared Customs agent who took one gander at Kap’n Cy and, bulge-eyed, exclaimed, “Wow! He’s a beaut!!”

  “That Lois,” she reminded me. “I hope I’m not calling at a bad time.”

  I turned off The View. “Matter of fact, you couldn’t have timed it better. I remember you well.”

  “And I remember your contents!”

  “Short redhead, knows how to work a zipper!”

  “Cute guy with stubble beard!”

  “Hate shaving!”

  “Your website says you’re divorced. I figure men lie all the time, but why would they lie on the Internet?”

  “Very insightful.”

  “You wouldn’t lie, right?”

  “Never,” I lied.

  “I’m wondering if that still might be the case? Unmarried, I mean.”

  “The Kapitein is at the helm.”

  “Awesome!”

  “You looked great in your uniform,” I said. “Very Customsish.”

  “You should see me without! Amazing!”

  “Double awesome!”

  “Quadruple amazing!”

  “You like movies?” I asked.

  “Love them!”

  “Me too!” I lied.

  “Who wouldn’t?”

  “Want to go sometime?!”

  “OMG!”

  “Amazing!”

  “I’m off Thursdays!”

  “I’ll check my schedule!”

  “I’ll give you my mobile number!”

  “I’ll write it down!”

  And so I did, and so Lowie and I went to a movie that very Thursday and sat in the back and shared a frosty malt, stopping occasionally to sword fight with our spoons. And that weekend I reintroduced her to the captain, both of us standing at attention and saluting the heroic commander. I turned on a nightlight, plugged in the ol’ skipper, and hoisted my mizzenmast.

  The problem being, for all its sex-shop brilliance, Amsterdam never reckoned with Lois’s own Force 12 uitbarsting. So that in the middle of the Kapitein azimuth-thrusting up her achterwerks, and her pupils tacking toward the aftcastle of her skull, the nightlight went dark, my refrigerator went silent, and the Kap’n himself stalled in a dead calm.

  “Uh oh,” Lowie muttered.

  “Hm.”

  “What happened?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Sail him back.”

  I shook, slapped, cajoled, and pleaded with Kap’n C., but it was not to be. He had abandoned ship. Alas, despite each man paying his own, Dutch genius had let me down.

  All was eerily quiet. I got up, slipped on my robe, padded to the window and saw—“Holy crap!”

  “What’s the matter?” Lois exclaimed, bolting up.

  “The whole neighborhood! Power out!”

  She stood next to me, tilting the blinds. The crack houses had all gone pfftt. Even the traffic lights that hadn’t already been stolen were lifeless retinas. “Must have been an overloaded transformer,” I guessed.

  “We did it,” she gasped. “Uh oh.”

  Apartment doors opened and closed. Voices in the hallway. Firearms cocking. Dogs growling.

  “What do we do now?” she whispered.

  “Maybe we should donate the captain to Goodwill.”

  She chewed her lip.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” I said. “I love seeing you happy. In fact, I haven’t been this happy myself for a long time, maybe never. It’s just that right now a gesture of charity might be what’s called for. Before the crackheads find out the truth and torture and kill us.”

  She gave me a hug and a snuggle. “Never this happy? Really, honest?”

  I kissed her forehead. “Never, ever.”

  “Do you think they’ll take it? Goodwill?”

  “They’ll take anything. And you know the best part? They give you a blank tax-deduction letter. You fill in your own amount!”

  Under my front door I could see flashlight beams sweeping along the hallway floor. More voices and cocking pistols. A light froze on my peephole.

  “Where are you going?” Lois whispered, tugging my sleeve as I slipped on my sandals.

  “They’re already suspicious of an English literature Ph.D. with a specialty in Shakespeare. No sense stoking the fire.” So I headed to the hallway to let my good neighbors know I really was a fellow capitalist. “Stay in the bathroom,” I told Lowie, so when I opened the door, the pimps and whores wouldn’t spot her undressed and think that I don’t respect women.

  I stepped out, and a dozen flashlights and semiautomatics took the measure of my sandals, robe, and stubbled mug. And then what do you think? A second later, all the hallway lights came back on. Woop! Power restored! Grimy bulbs aglow! And there I was, yours truly, in robe, sandals, and hockey beard, resembling the son of God, gazing divinely up and down the corridor, lovingly, forgivingly, and as the flashlights clicked off and the muzzles lowered, I became the most heavenly neighbor that rathole had ever known. Nazareth on the alley.

  They fell to their knees, the shitheads, hookers, and pit bulls, one by one, Rico and LaShawnDa and Jondro and Chlamydia, and with a gentle flick of my hand, I blessed them all, my good friends, canines, and gangbangers, and wordlessly returned to my crib.

  “What happened?” Lowie asked, as I ditched my sandals and robe.

  “A miracle. They woke up and smelled the shit.” Whereupon we returned whence we came, sans Kapitein Cyclops, and I presented the little Customs lady with, I trust I’m not seeming immodest here, the holiest Judeo-Christian shtupping of her life, if she was to be believed, which I absolutely did. There is something about your neighbors believing you are omnipotent that peps a fellow up. And it’s a hell of a lot cheaper than Cialis.7

  I hope I perked my neighbors up a bit, too. Not sexually or medicinally, but existentially—that believing they lived next door to the Messiah made them feel special in a way other than, say, solitary confinement; that this, yours truly, Almighty was more guardian than guard, more all-merciful than all-over-my-muthafuckin’-ass. I like to think that at least one or two of them changed their self-destructive ways, went back to live with their parents, re-enrolled in junior high, maybe even went on to pharmacy school and became good Republicans.

  The next day Lowie and I kissed the captain goodbye, packed him up nice and snug, kissed him again, and took him not to Goodwill but to the Salvation Army, where I—son of God, remember—cajoled the stoned-looking clerk into giving us two blank donation letters. I drove Lois to O’Hare and gave her a hug.

  Sure enough, despite my Shakespeare Ph.D., my community standing picked up. From then on, I never had to fetch my mail—it would be propped up against my newly scrubbed door, along with plates of tin foil-covered cookies. I now woke up not to the smell of shit, but of Pine-Sol and chocolate chips. The missing stairway bulbs were back, the blood stains washed off the walls, and someone had thoughtfully hammered down the protruding tack heads from the stolen hallway carpet. One afternoon I came home from work to sparkling clean windows with a note taped to one—“Whoever loved that loved not at first sight!”8 and an unbitten corned-beef-on-rye and kosher pickle in my fridge.

  Oh, yeah. My ex-wife soon married a fellow Lutheran, Ray—
the Drywalling While You Wait guy whose motto was I May Be Plastered, But I Don’t Drip. On their Las Vegas honeymoon, Ray got tangled in his flip-flops and took a header, impaling his eyeball on a margarita straw. With only one eye, and that one usually checking his toe fungus, Ray subsequently had a hard time judging the top step of his ladder (the one that says Caution, Do Not Step Here) and while practicing his line dancing on said top step fell head first into his Spackle bucket. So he retired on government disability, which suited my ex because it gave them lots of travel time. One day they returned from a Caribbean vacation and, at O’Hare Customs, happened to stand in you-know-who’s line. Lois held up her finger for them to wait while she tooted me on her cell phone. When I confirmed their identity, she politely asked the lovebirds to follow her to two private rooms, where ex-linebacker agents proceeded to search their cavities. Not dental cavities. And, sure enough, between Ray’s buttocks they found a Pabst Blue Ribbon beer can he had cleverly fashioned into a mini-safe crammed with—you guessed it—de aromatic weed. Ja love. Real Jamaican gold, mon—de kinda shit, whiff gonna wake you up.9

  In the third grade, Gary Buslik was voted the kid most likely to get the shit beat out of him. These days he writes essays, short stories, and novels. His work appears often in literary and commercial magazines and anthologies and has been included in eight Best Travel Writing editions. He is the author of the novels The Missionary’s Position and Akhmed and the Atomic Matzo Balls. His essay collection A Rotten Person Travels the Caribbean won the 2008 ForeWord Magazine and Benjamin Franklin Book Awards for travel writing. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he now teaches Shakespeare. You can visit him at: www.garybuslik.com

  EMMA THIEME

  You Go in the Morning, I Go

  at Night

  “Thank God I have done my doody duty.”

  —Admiral Horatio Nelson (1708-1805)