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ME: Can I get an iced coffee?
GIRL BEHIND THE COUNTER: Sure. What kind of ice do you want?
ME: ????
GIRL: (loudly) WHAT KIND OF ICE DO YOU WANT?
ME: ?????
GIRL: (bitchy) ICE. WHAT KIND?
ME: !!!!!!!
GIRL: (uber-bitchy) WELL?
ME: Look, I just want an iced coffee! Ice, and coffee! Of the regular, normal variety!
HER: (shoots me a nasty look)
ME: (returns nasty look)
HER: Will there be anything else today, MA’AM?
ME: I WILL CLIMB OVER THAT COUNTER AND PUNCH YOU IN THE FACE! (no, not really)
CHRISTOPHER: (who’s been staring at scones the whole time and missed the entire exchange) Can I get an iced mocha?
HER: (furious) WHAT KIND OF ICE DO YOU WANT WITH THAT ICED MOCHA?
CHRISTOPHER: (looks at me)
ME: Don’t look at me!
CHRISTOPHER: (to her) What options do I have?
HER: (as though we are the stupidest people in the history of the universe. As though she’d asked, Would you like to breathe oxygen or poisonous gases this afternoon? and we’d said, D’uh, What’s the difference?) ICE MADE WITH WATER OR ICE MADE WITH COFFEE.
ME: I’VE WORKED IN BRUCH SERVICE FOR OVER TEN YEARS, YOU LITTLE WHORE, AND I’VE NEVER HEARD OF ‘ICE WITH COFFEE OF ICE WITH WATER’ BEING ASKED AS A STANDARD COFFEE RELATED QUESTION SO DON’T YOU DAAAAARE CONDESCEND ME, JUST GIVE ME MY GODDAMNED ICED COFFEE! (no, not really)
CHRISTOPHER: Ice made with water is fine. It’s fine. Thank you.
Steve, Jim, Mark and Chip come into the Bongo Room every Sunday, along with several hundred other people who’d read in some online review that only “cool” people got to eat there, and Steve, Jim, Mark and Chip certainly considered themselves cool, yeah, they were cool, and loud, usually hung over, talking about last night at the Cubby Bear or the Hunt Club, they paid with Gold cards, were all good looking in an Ambercrombie and Fitch White-Sox-watching prepster sort of way, and they knew it—they used it—they tried to buddy up their waitress for faster service. “Hi, what’s your name?” they said when I came to the table, and I said, “Megan,” and they said, “Hi Megan, I’m Steve, and—“ he’d point—“Jim, Mark, Chip,” and I didn’t bother to say I knew all this, they’d done it before, done it last week, I’d told them my name about eighteen thousand times already and could they just get on with the pancakes, please? ‘cause the wait for a table was an hour and a half and the guy at twenty-three was bitching about his benedict being tepid (“Benedicts are supposed to be served room temperature, sir”) and I’d just got a nine-top on twenty-four, eight of whom wanted soy lattes—soy, for chrissakes!—and I didn’t have time to yak it up with the fellas for the gazillionth time so could you just order?
No, they couldn’t.
“You see that girl over there?” said Chip, nodding at a girl a couple tables over. She was beautiful, this girl—blonde, perky, button nose, eyes bright, big smile—a television commercial for toothpaste or hairspray—and I looked back at Chip and said, “What about her?”
“Can you find out if she’s married?” he asked.
“You want to ask her out?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “I want to marry her.”
The other guys laughed when he said that. “YOU’RE gonna get a girl like THAT?” they said. “THAT girl wouldn’t be caught dead with a guy like you! THAT girl eats guys like you for breakfast! Girls like THAT use guys like you as appetizers for the main course, you know what I’m saying, dude?” Har har, jab to the ribs, and Chip looked up at me and said, “Please.”
It was the please that did it.
I went over to the girl’s table, planning on doing a quick finger check—left hand, ring or no ring?—and then back to Chip with the verdict, but it wasn’t that easy. The girl was sitting with her left arm crossed over her stomach, her left hand tucked underneath her right armpit. She ate—egg white omelet—drank—grapefruit juice—and gestured—hand over mouth to subdue a burst of giggles—all with her right hand. I watched her for nearly a half hour. I turned three tables, poured six mimosas and put in two very complicated orders involving lots of substitutions, trying all the while to catch a glimpse of this girl’s ring finger.
“Well?” Chip asked when I refilled his coffee cup.
“I’m working on it,” I said. I walked past the girl’s table and dropped a napkin on the floor, squatting down to pick it up and trying to see under the girl’s arm from this new vantage point on the ground.
“What are you doing?” Kelly asked, after I was up off the floor and back in the service station with the other waitresses.
I told her, and Kelly found the story extremely exciting. She jumped up and down, coffee spilling over the edges of the pot in her hands. “That’s so romantic!” she sighed, heavy on the so. “It’s like when you’re on the subway and you see someone, and you lock eyes, and it gets too intense so you have to look away, and when you look back, they’re looking away, and what I always wonder is, what would happen if you just kept looking?”
I didn’t know what would happen.
“We’ll NEVER know what would happen,” Kelly said, “because nobody ever DOES anything. If someone would just—” but I stopped paying attention then, because the toothpaste girl was getting ready to leave. She was standing up. She was reaching for her jacket. She was dropping her left arm down and—no, no there wasn’t any ring, because there weren’t any fingers. There was a hand, yes, and some stumps of varying sizes where fingers ought to be, but weren’t.
The girl walked out of the restaurant and I went back to Chip’s table. “She doesn’t have any fingers,” I announced.
“What?”
I held up my left hand and folded my fingers into my palm. “No fingers,” I said again.
Steve Jim and Mark fell all over themselves with comments: “Leave it to you to fall for a girl without—“ and, “What are the odds of—“ and, “The one time you actually try to—“
Chip wasn’t hearing any of it. He looked kind of baffled, and was watching the space where his girl had once been.
I put myself in his line of vision. “Can I ask you something?” I said.
He waited.
“If she hadn’t of …. I mean, if she had … would you of done anything anyway?”
“Hell no, he wouldn’t of,” said Steve and Jim and Mark. “He’s chicken shit, he’s a pussy, she doesn’t have any finger—“ and they kept talking but their voices faded out, like some great sound engineer turned the volume down, and Chip looked at me and said, “Yeah, yeah I would’ve done something.” He paused, then said: “I’m not sure what, but something.”
You know what? I believed him.
Dear Mr. Zogby,
The only time I’ve been polled was in Chicago on the corner of Oak and Rush. You’ve been there, right? It’s pretty fancy-schmancy, all Gucci and Versace and high-end high-heels (which I don’t wear. See, I’m a schoolteacher and a waitress, so too much of shoes like that and my toes’d be scrambled by the end of the week, you know? I have Pumas. Blue ones). Anyway, there’s this diner a few blocks over called Johnny Rockets which is the only place in the city to get a decent milkshake and after, I was walking back to my car when this guy appeared out of nowhere and said, “Can I ask you about your hair?”
He was pretty, like out of a magazine ad: super-hip faded jeans and white starched T-shirt—seriously, starched! A T-shirt! And I mean really white, this is a guy who gets his whites white!—and very lovely red hair with very perfect red spikes. And me? I’m … low-maintenance. I had on Osh-Gosh from the thrift store and a tank-top—I’m not so good with the whites, FYI—and my hair was blonde up until I discovered Manic Panic—that’s hair dye in very bright colors, Mr. Zogby, red and blue and pink—but ever since I graduated college it’s been sort of … gray, and there’s a lot of it. At work, I wear it tied back, but that day? the day I was polled? it was down, blowing in my face and irritating the crap out of me. Maybe that’s why I said “sure” to that guy. He had great hair, and I told him so.
“It’s because of—THIS!” he said, and on the THIS he pulled a bottle out of the clear blue sky, all TADA!
“What’s that?” I asked.
He told me some brand name—I don’t remember which—and then he said, “You’re going to try it—RIGHT NOW!”
Now, this next part is a bit surreal, Mr. Zogby, but stay with me: out of the same nowhere that he’d pulled the bottle, there came more guys, all perfectly dressed, all with great hair. One had a basin, another, towels—there was even a faucet on a hose—and suddenly, I’m standing there on the corner of Oak and Rush with my head underwater. Fingers massaged creams and gels and goops into my scalp. There was much rinsing and repeating. Where is all the water coming from? I wondered. Am I plugged into a fire hydrant? I don’t know how long I was down there but the blood was rushing to my head from too much time upside-down and the whole time, they asked questions: “What do you think about the texture?” “What do you think about the manageability?” “What do you think about the conditioning?” and, after it was over—after I was toweled off, my hair brushed through and dripping on the sidewalk between Barney’s and Prada,—they surrounded me and asked, “What do you think about the difference?”
I asked what difference they referred to.
“The difference between THIS—” they gestured to their bottle—“and whatever you were using BEFORE!”
I ran my hands through my hair.
“Well?” they insisted. They were eager and excited, leaning forward and poised with clipboards to document my response.
Real quick: at the restaurant where I work weekends, we’ve got a crab sandwich. People are all the time asking, “How’s the crab?” and I say, “great,” because everyone says its great, even though I don’t much like crab. The reality is, the crab is the most expensive thing on the menu, so I get tipped at a higher percentage, which I need to pay back my college loans. I only bring this up, Mr. Zogby, to show that truth isn’t a simple thing, even though maybe it should be. Maybe we should try telling the truth. Like I should say, “The crab sucks,” even if then they get the turkey, which is five bucks less. That was my thinking when those guys asked me about the shampoo. I looked at them all perfectly matched and styled like some boy band, and said, “It feels the same to me.”
The silence was great.
“I’m sorry,” I told them. “It’s the truth.”
In unison, they all straightened up, their chiseled features contorted horribly (no one, Mr. Zogby—NO ONE—can shoot a dirty look like a pretty boy). They picked up their basin and their hoses, their tubes and their bottles, and one-by-one stalked into the nearest department store. Just before the last one disappeared, he tossed his head and said, “We don’t care what you think ANYWAY.”
One could say, Mr. Zogby, that after that experience I was a bit turned off to the whole poll thing. But recently, with everything that’s been going on in the world, I find myself a bit concerned. There’s all these What Do You Think questions in the news these days, like “What do you think about the current administration?” and, “What do you think about the war in Iraq?” and, “What do you think about FEMA?” and the answers to these questions are proceeded with the words Polls Show That. The thing of it is, these polls—these numbers and percentages and graphs—don’t represent me, and since I know YOU care what I think what with you being in charge of the biggest pollster in the country, I’d like to cordially invite you to poll me.
I think what happened was, my target market was overlooked. The lower-middle class? Mid-to-late twenties, college graduates taking second jobs? Some of us are artists, some supporting older parents or younger kids? Most of us pay health insurance out-of-pocket, our gas bills are skyrocketing—are we sounding familiar to you, Mr. Zogby? I called up the people at Gallup to point out the oversight, and they referred me to a recent poll they’d done about polling that said the public polled about their polls found those polls to be accurate as polled, and how do you argue with that? So I thought, maybe you’d be interested in polling someone like me. I thought it’d be easiest if I came to your office at Zogby International, but the address wasn’t listed so here’s a compromise: I’ll be at the corner of Rush and Oak—Wednesday? How’s Wednesday for you?—and you can ask me whatever questions you’re asking people about this world we all live in.
You’ll be able to recognize me, easy. I’m the one with the hair.
Christopher has a friend named Gregg. Gregg collects vintage Hotwheels, spells his name with three g’s and loves Apple computers and all things internet-y—he and Christopher “geek out” together (I’m never exactly sure what “geeking out” means but it does involve beer and speaking in a weird language called HTML which, in our house, is pronounced “hhhhit-timmm-ulll” and involves symbols like these: <<<< >>>>> which Christopher calls “Carrots” but I call “Poop” ‘cause of that Me and You and Everyone We Know movie). When Christopher and I started dating, Gregg and his wife, Tonya (who is awesome for several reasons including, but not limited to, A. she makes me laugh really hard and B. she introduced me to Stoli Vanilla and soda) threw a party and made me feel very welcome (meeting the new boyfriend’s friends! Ahhhh, the PRESSURE!). The best part of this party was their six-year-old daughter kept shooting me with a squirt gun, which somebody said was ‘cause she had a crush on Christopher, which ended up being good preparation for all the other women who had crushes on Christopher (Christopher is reading this right now and shaking his head. He’s thinking, “Hmmm,” which in Christopherspeak means, “That is a big fat lie,” to which I’ll say that he’s one of those rare guys who doesn’t notice when pretty girls are checking him out, but I, of course, notice and, usually, point it out to him. “That girl in the green is totally checking you out!” I’ll say, and he’ll say, all oblivious, “She must just have something in her eye,” and go back to whatever he was talking about before, and I look up at the sky and think, “Please tell me what I did to deserve this awesomeness so I can repeat said action over and over for the rest of my life, A-men).
Anyhow, Gregg and Christopher had some beers the other night, and when he got home, Christopher said, “Gregg wants to know why you haven’t posted on your blog in so long. He says he reads four blogs a day and yours is one and you haven’t done anything new in a really long time, and when you do post you post like five hundred posts in one day and he said, ‘Why don’t you tell her about staggering?’ and I told him, ‘Story of my life,’ and he said—”
“Wait,” I interrupted. “Staggering is the story of your life?”
“No,” he said, and then he said a lot of fancy words which I totally can’t quote verbatim but the gist of it was that repeatedly telling me about technical advancements that will make my life easier/faster/sunnier which I then promptly forget due to my I Can’t Be Bothered attitude about technology in general is the story of his life.
“So you’ve told me about this staggering thing before, I take it?” I said.
He groaned. “I’ve ONLY told you about it ten times.”
“You did?”
“I did.”
“Tell me again,” I said, so he explained it all again, something about how I can sit down and write nine posts and there’s some application on my computer which will post them randomly over X amount of days to make it look as though I’m posting regularly, when in fact I’m more of a When the Spirit Moves Me poster, which is a different thing entirely from a When the Spirit Moves Me WRITER. I do write every day—I just don’t post every day. Sometimes I think, Well, that would work really well in my novel. Or, That would fit into what I’ve got going for 2nd Story. Or, Whoever’s reading my blog these days wouldn’t be interested in THAT. Or, I’m not sure what I MEAN yet, so I’m not quite ready to put that out there. Or even, It’ll be cold day in hell before I’ll show this to anyone—and sometimes all of the above.
D.H. Lawrence has this line (my students are thinking, “Again with the DH Lawrence! Can you find somebody else to quote, please!” to which I’ll say, “Is that a challenge!? Did you just take the gloves off your left hands and throw them at my feet?” to which they’ll say, “Whaaa?” and I’ll say, “Please educate yourselves here) “I do not know what I think until I see what I say,” which is how I go about most everything. I write and I write and trust that eventually it’ll make sense, like Oh my God, I’m getting married next month (WHAT? you say. You’re getting married NOW? I didn’t get my invitation! to which I’ll say, Ohh! Ohh! Let’s play CHARADES! One word. Two syllables. First syllable: it’s a vowel! A—no—E—yes, E! Okay! Second syllable: rhymes with an orange melon-like fruit and a large mammal that travels in herds across the African plains and uses its horns to defend itself from predators. Come on, come on!) that’s fucking huge and there’s fifteen thousand magazines about planning a wedding but not a whole lot about planning a future (unless they’re of the financial variety, but I’m talking the whole I Come From Divorce and will I one day wake up all insane and Christopher will think, “Who IS this girl?”—cue Annie Lennox Who’s That Girl—“And where did Megan go?” and I’ll want to say, “I’m right HERE! I don’t know what’s HAPPENING! I just don’t want to screw this up!” How come there’s not a magazine for that? Huh? But yet One Hundred and One Ways to Wear a Veil [which I’m not wearing, FYI] and is that really a metaphor for a woman’s hymen? What? Did she just say hymen?) and, also, next month is my birthday which, like all birthdays, brings up the whole Why Haven’t I Accomplished XYZ By This Time, I’m thirty-ONE! shouldn’t I have blah and blah and blah by now and—Oh my God—is that a gray hair? Is that one? Is that one? And, while we’re at it, did I really plan my birthday and my wedding in the same week and what exactly is happening in the Middle East right now? And the New York courts ruled WHAT about gay marriage? And Superman has a KID? and I wonder, do people actually want to read all that?
Because I’m not even sure what I’m talking about, I’m just writing to figure it out. So should I just wait and post when everything’s all sorted out, and written very nicely, with pretty grammar and clear thesis statements and organized, inspiring clarity?
This is where someone should remind me that my last post was about peach-flavored water. Inspiring this is not.
ANYHOW, I haven’t been posting for a while. I’ve been figuring some stuff out. And working on my book. And living a little—it’s summertime, people! You should all rush out and have a Vanilla Stoli and Soda! Get yourself a squirt gun and shoot the new girlfriends of the boys you have crushes on! Go out for beers with a friend you haven’t seen in a while and ask them about their girlfriends blog! Invite that girlfriend over to your house to hang out with you and your wife who makes her laugh really hard ‘cause she’d love to see you both and is way jealous that Christopher got to, ‘cause of course he didn’t rub her nose in it, of course he wasn’t like I got to hang out with Gregg with three g’s and his Hotwheels, hahaha <<<<<<<< >>>>>>>>.
Whew.
Thanks, Gregg. I needed that.
I’m gonna stagger the next batch. For you.
What I’ve been doing lately is making lists. I’m working off one right now titled Stuff to Do Before You Get Married. The first item on this list is shoes (this lets you know what my priorities are). Five or six items down it says Dress, with a line drawn through the word ‘cause I got the dress and can therefore check it off the list (other words with lines drawn through include Something Blue, Something New, Photographer and Liquor). Some words have little asterisks next to them to denote things that may take some time to accomplish so I should get them taken care of ASAP. For example, Rings. Spa appointment. Christopher’s Suit (he’s very tall and needs to special-order pants). Marriage license.
I figured getting a marriage license would take a while, what with this being Cook County so anything red-tape related usually takes several months and much stress and money and long, long lines. We’ll need background checks. And then, of course, they’ll have to look at our medical records. Didn’t they do that back in the day—blood tests? And then, we’ll have to sit down with some sort of counselor, right? To show that we really are in love and understand the overwhelming responsibility of marriage? I know I’d have to do that if I was getting married in a church (which I’m not) or if neither Christopher nor I was an American citizen, so I assumed since the government feels so strongly about respecting marriage as an institution—about how it’s the cornerstone of our society and needs to be protected from anything that may soil its traditions and, consequently, the values of our nation—that they’d be sure that anyone they were licensing to marry would treat marriage with equal reverence.
Imagine my surprise when we went down to the City Clerk’s office last week to get the ball rolling.
You take an escalator downstairs past the Vital Statistics office. At the foot of the escalator is a guy with a Polaroid camera and an internet certificate from the Church of Whatever that proves him ordained to officiate a marriage ceremony. For a few bucks he’ll take your picture, a few more and he’ll marry you, on the spot. Christopher and I walked into an office with three or four other couples (one male, one female in each, of course). We showed ID. We filled out a form. We paid thirty dollars and were given a slip of paper, which will be filled out by the person who officiates our marriage ceremony and mailed back to City Hall.
Done.
Now, I’m all for less government. For fast-moving lines at City Offices. For minimal paperwork and little if any probing by the State into my personal life. But, I must admit, I’m a little uncomfortable that, in the eyes of the law, it takes more work for me to get my car out of the DMV that it does for me to get married.
It’s harder to get a copy of my social security card. A mail-in-rebate off the new palm pilot.
The cop who pulled me over last week for speeding did a more thorough background check on me than the government official issuing me a marriage license.
The thing is, I’m in AWE of marriage. I’m excited for and humbled by and in awe of what Christopher and I are about to do—here’s two people all wild about each other making a promise to take on this crazy world together as a team. To share all the ups and downs of it all and work our hardest to face all the things that scare the hell out of us, that—THAT—is profoundly awesome. The government’s involvement in all this is, of course, pretty low on my totem poll of What Marriage Means to Me. But with all the rhetoric that’s being thrown around lately—Marriage this, marriage that, respect it, tradition, tradition—I just figured there’d be a little … more.
Let’s be honest: a LOT fucking more.
On the way out, one of the couples who’d been standing in line before us was getting married by the Polaroid camera guy. They looked really happy, hugging and laughing at the base of that escalator, but still, I wondered: what was their story? How long had they known each other? The possibilities were, of course, endless—maybe they really are in love and have been together for a while and are honestly committed to making this thing work, or, maybe they met the night before, drunk at some bar and thought, Hey, What the Hell. Whatever their reason, the State certainly didn’t care about it.
For the record, I’m all for getting ordained on the internet. Christopher and I asked a good friend of ours to perform our marriage ceremony—someone who is married himself and who we’ve both learned a great deal from about love and commitment and honesty and respect. I feel lucky indeed that he and his husband have given us such a powerful role model. Everyone should be so fortunate.
When we lived in Prague, all I ever drank was peach Mattoni. Okay, that’s not true at all. I also drank wine, bourbon, becherovka, absinthe and mojitos. And gluhwein—mulled wine—in the fall. And French martinis when I got homesick. And coffee all day long, so I guess what I’m saying is that when I wasn’t drinking coffee or drinking-drinking, I was drinking peach Mattoni, which is sparkling flavored water (and no, don’t tell me about other peach-flavored waters, ‘cause I tried them all and none are as good as Mattoni. Just like Fuji water is not as good as Smart water—no, Christopher, it’s NOT! I KNOW they’re both water, but Miller and Kozel are both BEER, and you don’t drink Miller! It’s exactly the same thing) and I couldn’t find it in the States. So, whenever we go grocery shopping, I stand there in front of the flavored water and whine about how much I miss my peach Mattoni. So, last week, Christopher went online and found some American Mattoni distributing warehouse, and called them, and got the name of an obscure Czech market on the Northwest side where we went and got slammed in the face with dejavu: Czech chocolate, Czech sausage, Czech cheese, Czech water, Czech wafers, Czech beer, Czech language. Czech coupons, Czech Czech Czech, and now I’m homesick in the other direction.
But I have my peach Mattoni. In BULK.
Christopher got a forty-gallon aquarium for his birthday and read all sorts of books and after the freshwater plants developed spirogyra he got three Zebra Danio fish and three Red-eyed Tetras whose poop turned into algae which made the aquarium a sustainable environment so he says now I can get a black angel fish, which is all I really wanted in the first place. After he explained all this to me, I said, “Isn’t Spyo-gyra that band we saw at the Czech Jazz Festival?” and, being inquisitive as to why a Seventies smooth jazz band would name themselves after algae, we asked google and were told that the saxophone player had just written a paper on spirogyra for a biology class when some club owner asked him the name of his band. He said spirogyra as a joke, and the club owner misspelled it and that’s how they were marketed.
If I were to borrow from this process in naming my own (hypothetical) band, it would be called “Community-building through Storytelling: a proposed workshop for CCA’s Symposium on Art and Public Life.”
“Hey everybody! Put your hands together for Chicago’s own MEGAN and the Community-Building Through Storytellers!”
Not so catchy, huh?
I must admit that this aquarium is pretty great. Christopher sits in front of his tank watching the Tetras and says MOOM MOOM MOOM. Mojo sits watching Christopher, wondering if this is a new game. I sit on the couch and drink a martini.