The Plot Thins

(April 14, 2001)

Stress is bad for you. I should have kept my promise and finished, five days ago, the tale of the porno novel, property repossession threats, dog shit, Boy George, a stash of pot, Denis Leary, and a hairpiece. If your neck is tensed up, or your stomach is queasy, or you have hives, you're probably really stressed out waiting for me to tell the whole story.

Have a Valium, because I decided NOT to tell the whole story. End-to-end, it's boring, now that I think about it. There's really no story here. I will, however, tell just the pieces that concern the porno novel, property repossession threats, dog shit, Boy George, a stash of pot, Denis Leary, and a hairpiece. Not necessarily in that order.

So here is a string of non-sequitors.

...My mom gave me a watercolor of Boy George for my birthday. She painted it and it's beautiful.

...Denis Leary has this thing where he books a hockey rink in Newington, CT for a bunch of guys and they all play, and my brother plays a lot. I just love Denis Leary, and I dig that he uses his name recognition for so many cool things, like the Cam Neely Foundation and the firefighters' benefits. Like, a lot of well-known faces have homes around the area where Hub and I went to high school and where our parents still live, but we usually don't care. Who cares. But I really do like Denis Leary.

...You all know by now that my parents are living The Money Pit, but without the snappy one-liners. It's been four years since they "decided" to do this thing...and decided is in quotes because my parents decide to do something the way a toddler decides to fall on his little padded ass. It's not so much a purposeful weighing of the options or calculation of risk. It's more a sort of haphazard momentum. Well, somewhere during the last four years of heavy financial burdens and minute-to-minute existence, my mother lost her hair. Every last one, just like Princess Caroline. Now THAT'S stress. It would break my heart to see her, with a bright scarf tied around her head, pretending that she was alright with it, like Princess Caroline, going to her events and dinners. She went on a hat-buying spree. She wore hats all the time, even inside. But she wasn't alright, she'd burst into tears at...well, at the drop of a hat, I guess. So when, around Christmas, she investigated the Hair Club thing, and actually got it done, it was an enormous relief. For the first time in what seems like ages, she looks happy. Her smile is back. She sports an adorable little bob now, that really looks a lot like her hair. It's pretty wild. But the most important thing is what it did for her well-being. Well, during the holidays she went to visit Maggie. Maggie must have forgotten that her daughter was bald last time she saw her, because the subject didn't come up-- that's how good the Hair Club hair looks! Well, a few weeks later it dawned on Maggie. She called JoAnna saying, "Lemme ask you something. That's not YOUR hair." JoAnna said no, it wasn't. "How much did you pay for that THING?" barked Maggie. "Eight hundred dollars," answered JoAnna. "EIGHT HUNDRED DOLLARS! YOU'RE CRAZY! CAN YOU TAKE THAT THING BACK?" JoAnna was totally broken up, a mess, because her mother is so, so insensitive. Even though we all knew that's the exact way that Maggie would react.

..."Dad," I asked, "Why do you have a framed copy of a 1987 Wall Street Journal page one?"
"I'm painting this guy's house," said Louie. "Norm Perlstine. He has a lot of shit around, he gave me those things, I just wanted the frames for your mother's watercolors. I don't know why he framed that."
"Well that's weird. What's his name again?" I asked.
"Norm Perlstine." I found the name at the bottom of one of the columns. Next to it was Editor-in-chief, Time Inc.. "Here's why. He wrote this one," I pointed it out to Louie. "He still Editor-in-chief for Time?" I asked.
"Yeah," Louie said. "His wife is a writer."
"What's her name?"
"Ever hear of Nancy Friday?"
"What is that, like mystery?"
"No, kind of...it's like...here, this is her latest book, you can have it." It's erotica. My dad gave me a porn novel. I'm gonna read it, too. I LOVE porn. I told him that. "Me too!" he yelled. Finally, something we agree on. Ah, tender moments. Norman Rockwell should have been there.

...I took the book, but not the pot. I didn't even feel like smoking that night, and I didn't want to take it with me. "Dad, I'm not taking that back to Boston in the car. With my luck we'll get stopped and Hub and I will both end up with a record." Or in jail. Think about that. That's all it takes.