Dead Man's Honda

“Maaaannnn, I really feel for you with those cats,” "Patty" said with a wrinkled Oakie accent. I smiled. This one-of-a-kind woman (who has been stalking her husband online during their separation) more than makes up for the fact that Neon Bangs Woman has decided to go copper for the rest of her life and fails to entertain me anymore except when she’s dragging a Dora the Explorer backpack on wheels out to the parking lot.

“They’re cute, just getting kinda large,” I commented lightly before Patty started speaking again(clasping the edge of the table and thrusting her shoulders forward)and described a woman on the fourth floor of our building. Her intensity is jolting.

“You know, I says to her, you gotta get rid of that cat! She has a cat that shits in her bed, you know,” she said as if I should already know this. My lunch caught in my throat.

“What?!”

“Yeah it has some sorta disease..or something wrong with it…and it shits everywhere--- I tell you what, if I was rollin’ around in cat shit at night I would definitely put my cat down. It's just what you gotta do! But she won’t put it to sleep!”

If my mouth hadn’t been full my jaw would have fallen on to the table.

Patty is startlingly similar to someone in a perpetual state of mania. She arrives at work at 6:30 am. She works out constantly. She has another part-time job just for fun. She works overtime. She has horses. Her speech is urgent and often uninterrupted and lacks a general “filter” for most subjects--- like her husband’s double hernia. So it's either mania, kick-bootay vitamins, or she's on speed. I wouldn't really rule out any of those.

“So did she take it to a vet?” I asked.

“No! She took it to the cat communicator and I’ll tell you what--that cat communicator told her the cat’s fine and I says, I don’t care what a cat communicator says, I says, I wouldn’t put up with that for five seconds,”

“What the heck is a cat communicator?” I asked.

“A pet psychic, you know.”

My three male co-workers were coughing on their food at this point— eyes watering to keep from spewing across the table—but trying to remain discrete since Patty clearly didn’t think the pet communicator was as odd as the woman who slept with cat crap in her bed.

“Seriously? She goes to a pet psychic?”

“Oh all the time! She had one cat that got lost and she went to the cat communicator and the cat communicator told her it was dead and she should just give up lookin’ for it, and do you know what happened two days later? The pet shelter called her sayin’ they found her cat. I mean if that doesn’t tell you what these cat communicators are all about I don’t know what will…” I clenched my abs to keep from laughing all over the table.

“But you know my husband’s kid? The one that’s a kleptomaniac? Well my husband is lockin’ him outta certain rooms now and I says to him— wasn’t I right? Wasn’t I right that your kid is a total stealing psycho? But gosh that double hernia is just killin’ him right now." She turned to my co-worker, "Joe". "Joe you ever had one of those?”

Just another lady of the Lot…..

Is my lil' sis gorgeous, or WHAT?!Photos by Jan Garcia.

It's obvious but we really didn't know what we were doing.

On the other end of the line the scratch of a radio playing or a conversation blotted out pieces of his anxiety-laced voice.

“He jumped out of a car…he’s upset….can you come tutor maybe later tonight?”

“Is he ok?”

“Oh…uh…yeah…I mean..it’s just stuff with…anyway—can you come back at maybe like 8:30 or 9?”

8:30 or 9? On a Sunday night?

“Yeah sure, if that’s what you want.”

“I think he needs the help to get organized…I just…I’ll call you when we’re headed back.”

The phone cut out. I sat back down. Drama with D. again.

When I finally got there the house was dark and I heard the dog barking at me but I couldn’t see her anywhere.

“Dammit we left the dog in the car,” D said when he opened the door for me and I mentioned the barking.

I snorted a laugh trying to keep it in.

“Get to work, D.,” his dad called out while flipping through stacks of loose paperwork fanned out as erratically on the kitchen table as his hair was sticking off of his head. I shook my head at the endearing yet humorous sight and we went downstairs.

“An F in Bible?” I said looking at the transcripts with dismay.

“Um—excuse me, F PLUS!” D retorted.

For a genius he is strategically negligent. “We’ve got to work on these journal entries—you’re just being marked down because of these little assignments. You’re doing really well on the tests—just like all your classes. It’s the homework that’s killing you.”

“It’s a lost cause, let’s just ignore it. I’ll take it again in the summer,” he said as we organized his schedule.

“No. You’re making this work up just on the principle of the thing. You can't just NOT do your homework for months on end. Ok, let’s start with this one--- what’s your observation on Mk. 2- 5?” I asked after opening it up and showing the passage to him. I glanced to my left and saw the assignment stating he needs to write an Epistle to his church youth group.

“Aw crap,” escaped from my mouth as I slammed my head on the table. D doesn’t go to church. In fact, his dad decided to transition the family from being non-practicing Catholics to Buddhists. Overnight. Six months after the separation and two months after introducing the kids to his new girlfriend. Lovely.

How am I going to get him to fake this to complete the course and yet be true to himself?

“Let’s get back to these journals. We'll do this other thing later. What’s happening in these chapters?”

Silence.

I turned around to find D leaning back with a Sharpie pen up his nose.

“Stop that,” I said snatching the pen away.

“How else am I going to be able to absorb this stuff? Whoever wrote it was on drugs so if I’m going to discuss it I better get high off of something too. Do you know you can get high off of body spray? We did lines of it at surf camp.”

“Read that D, c’mon—we don’t want to do this all night.”

“Ok so my observation is that Jesus and the Lord can heal anything.”

Jesus and the Lord….I bit my lip with amusement.

“But that’s bullshit because if you pray to the Jesus and you have a cold and it gets better in a week it’s because your body fixed it. And if you cut your finger off and then you pray for it to grow back, it won’t. Trust me.”

What to say?

“What’s your interpretation on this next section?”

“That John the Baptist was on drugs and clearly deranged and Jesus was probably pissing holy water in his loin cloth….or at least they’d say it was holy because they think he was holy but he wasn’t of course but if they think he is then they must think his piss is….”

“D,” I said turning to him and sighing. “I realize this is NOT the subject you want to study and to be honest I feel terrible making you do it— but if you're going to go to college you have to--.”

“Ok so here’s an SAT question for you: Imaginary friends are to children as blank is to adults.”

I just stared at him--- running out of patience.

“God--- GOD is the same thing to adults and serves the same purpose to adults as imaginary friends serve children. That’s insightful. Admit it—I’m insightful with that.”

“Yes, D, you’re insightful. You’re always insightful.” I drummed my fingers on the table.

“And I’m always right,” he added “Just like I’m right that my mom is a bitch.”

I twitched. “D, what happened today?”

“Just the same old drama shit. She was being such a bitch because she told us not to drive with my dad who has a suspended license,”

“He what?Why is he driving?”

“How else is he going to get around?”

(In my mind: eyes rolling)

“Well, she was saying this and that and then there was fighting so I told her to stop the muther f-ing car I was getting out and she tried to lock the doors and I had to jump over my sister and my surfboard and told her she was an F-ing bitch--”

“You said that to your MOTHER!?! You used that kind of language with your mother—on mother’s day?!”

“Yeah well my dad said she is one…”

And then there was that familiar sick feeling. He’s hilarious, insightful, fun, handsome and young. He’s young. His parents aren’t being adults to each other and they have passed their hostility on to their child—with ugly results to show for it. And he's too young to understand the damage.

I don’t understand how the happy family in his photos—the happy families in any photos—cross over from love and affection to outright hatred and hostility toward one another. How do we get so far from point A (loving each other?) to point B (despising each other, leaving each other, and then throwing that hostility around as if it created itself)?

I can’t tell D that he shouldn’t feel the way he does--- just like I can’t even tell myself I shouldn’t feel the way I do half of the time. All I can do is change how I act with what I feel, someone told me recently, and that, to be honest-- seems just as difficult sometimes.