Magnificent Vibration (21 page)

“Mom, she’s a Catholic, not a Satanist,” I try.

“It’s close,” answers Mommy the Presbyterian.

Accursed religious intolerance.

“I guess she won’t be babysitting for us,” I joke to Charlotte the Catholic.

Charlotte grabs my arm with her G.I. Joe kung-fu grip.

“Ouch,” I squeal like a wussy.

“I’m not into having children,” she says firmly.

“Shouldn’t we have discussed that before saying our vows, renting the band, and prepping the toilet for the three a.m. hurling session because we both drank way too many vodka tonics and glasses of champagne on an empty stomach?” I want to say but again do not. It’s too
late, anyway. Maybe there’s a dog in my future, and as if she’s reading my mind she adds, “And I’m not a dog person, either.”

Damnit! Oh well, no kids, no dogs. Maybe she’ll be okay with a cat if I can just get a handle on my cat allergies that cause my eyes to redden and swell shut, my throat to close up enough to be life-threatening, and my skin to break out into angry red hives. On Google I look up “What is the third most popular pet in the United States?” figuring correctly that the first two are dogs and cats. Ferrets! Ferrets come in third. I wonder if I’m allergic to ferret fur? They sound like a tough sell: “Darling, how about a ferret or two?”

Onward!

I marry her.

Yep. I do.

That’s pretty much it.

And I remind myself of a guy I met on a plane once, after I’d begun taking the odd flight here and there for my work. I start chatting lightly as one occasionally does with a fellow traveler who isn’t trying to steal
both
armrests, doesn’t smell like spoiled milk mixed with urine, and isn’t coughing, sneezing, and loogie-hawking all over you. He’s an older man, and he starts talking about his life. He goes on and on about the year and a half he spent in the army, serving in the Vietnam War when he was twenty-one. And he still seems really charged up about it. There are stories of dangerous missions and anecdotes about wild nights spent with war buddies and hookers during R & R in Nah Trang and Sydney. Amazingly vivid recollections and memories that seem to be burned right into his brain cells.

He doesn’t stop talking for most of the three-hour flight about his time in “ ’Nam.” Finally the conversation slows, and I ask him what
he’s done since leaving the army. He sums it up in three words: “I’m in insurance.”

And that’s it. That’s all he has to say about the following forty years.

I think I may be in a similar situation with the whole marriage bit. Three words: “I got married.”

And I don’t even have anything as cool as going to war (though I’ve never been to war to see if it’s cool or not) to compare with the rest of my dull life. Okay, there is a little more to my married life than those three words, but it often doesn’t feel like it.

I move up in the “firm” and actually start working on the “movies” if I may use that word in connection with the on-screen feculence we have to deal with. Sorry, I know I sound bitter.

Charlotte and I do the honeymoon thing, going only as far as San Diego and our finances will allow. A week and a half at The Shores Hotel, which isn’t actually on the shores, but set a few blocks back from them, so that’s a bit of false advertising on their part. I get such a great deal on the room, however, that I decide not to moan about it. The time goes fairly slowly (never a good sign on a vacation and possibly even less so on a honeymoon), and we eventually arrive home eager to get back to our separate routines. We are kind of relieved to be done honeymooning because, with the whole day and night free, once the “dance with the swollen pickle” was done, there really wasn’t a whole hell of a lot to talk about, which leads me to believe that we may not actually have a lot in common as a post-coital couple.

But we are married, and I assume we’re both committed to making it work, whatever that means. We’ll come up with something else to take the place of actual conversation. Possibly we can take a class together. Juggling, maybe. Or macramé.

Head down, move forward.

We eventually buy a small house that’s beyond both our means, as is the American way, and I, after many attempts, succeed in talking Charlotte into getting a dog. I think I threaten her with a ferret, which she believes is a type of large rat. In the end this wins the battle for me. It’s a big battle, the dog battle. And I do win it, but I definitely lose the war.

The memory of barbecued Bob still lingers at the edges of my memory, along with the need to heal the wound of losing him. Or maybe I just like dogs. We see a man selling puppies in a shopping mall parking lot one Sunday and I look at Charlotte, who rolls her eyes, which I take as a fully enthusiastic acceptance of the plan. Full steam ahead on acquiring the dog. And away we go.

The conversation with the owner of the puppies goes something like this.

The world-famous lonely cricket chirps in the moonlight somewhere on a cold and windy mesa in Taos, New Mexico. There is an uncomfortable silence that lasts for a second or two or three. Then . . .

I buy the cutest one. Actually he’s the one that seems to like me the most, and I name him Murray and he is fully awesome. Charlotte thinks he’s a filthy, hair-shedding varmint, bred only to chew her good shoes and the crotches out of her underwear.

I give him the thumbs-up on all three activities.

I keep Josie’s little wooden box on the mantel over the fake fireplace of our new home.

Charlotte thinks it’s “creepy.”

My girl Josie is most certainly not creepy.

We have a brief summer of love, my new wife and I, and then we both hunker down for the remaining long winter of her discontent.

She gets fired (for reasons I’m not clear on) and I get promoted at the video-dubbing house of crap movies. It creates the beginnings of a tension that slowly grows with an argument here, a screaming match there, over the next few years as we both start to realize we have made a horrible mistake by heedlessly jumping into the whole wedlock business, so ill-suited are we as a couple. I begin to want the marriage to work for Murray’s sake. He doesn’t need the baggage of coming from a broken home. Okay, I may be anthropomorphically projecting onto our dog a little here, but really, he hates it when we argue so I assume he would
be devastated if we got an actual divorce. Unfortunately, he is already a damaged child. I love Murray. Murray loves me. Murray loves Charlotte. Charlotte doesn’t love Murray. It seems my dog is having the same luck with women I had when I was his age. Must be hereditary.

Charlotte finally finds work as a vehicle inspector at Enterprise Rent-a-Car in Thousand Oaks. This means she checks the returning cars for “door dings.” The job doesn’t have a very healthy, corporate ladder-ascending future, but it does add a little something to the weekly pot. The arguments continue nonetheless.

And just when the video-dubbing house from hell has become the only place where I can get any kind of peace and freedom from the anxiety and squabbles at home . . .

Enter The Right Whale.

He takes an instant dislike to me for some reason, and his first action is to ban Murray (who I have been bringing to work with me since things at home have gotten so tense) from the premises.

Then he bans coffee from the dubbing rooms, although no one has ever dumped coffee anywhere but down their caffeine addicted pie-holes. This is almost as bad as banning Murray, such a coffee ho have I become. And with good reason.

Hour after hour of these siesta-inducing films bestow on the unlucky viewer the need for serious stimulants. I briefly consider amphetamines but decide against it after seeing some frightening “before and after” photos of meth addicts on AOL.

The Right Whale begins out-and-out abuse and name-calling. It’s very stressful for yours ass-wipedly (one of his favorite sayings). Not so much as a result of the mistreatment but because if he’s talking to you, you can’t miss seeing those little white milky curd balls in the corners of his mouth. And if you try to look away he gives you the “Look at me
when I’m talking to you” line. Really? Do I have to? I sometimes wonder if he’s married and there’s some poor woman out there who has to see those cheese-clotted lips coming in for a goodnight kiss. Eeeeuuuuuuwwwwwww! He focuses his wrath on others, too, but I seem to be his favorite. Lucky teacher’s pet.

One morning, we’re all ordered to crowd into the lunchroom for a “bulletin.” The Right Whale waddles in and grandly announces to everyone that we are moving offices. To a bigger and better facility. In Valencia. Everyone moans, because our cool new digs are now a three-hour car ride in peak traffic. The Right Whale goes apeshit in response to our mild discontent, and when he’s done yelling he tells us that because of his gifted and brilliant stewardship, this firm has landed another huge account and we should all be goddamn grateful that he’s keeping us out of the poorhouse. And we had better stop our whining and bitching.

“Please, please let it be a real movie studio with real watchable movies,” I whisper a prayer to the Hollywood film gods.

“We will be working on films supplied by a firm called “La Société de Cinema,” he announces proudly.

“Hey, that’s French,” I think to myself. “The French make some great movies. Fairly uninspired name, but it is in a language other than Khmer. This is promising.”

What I don’t know is that French is spoken by a significant minority in a certain Eastern country that’s about to surprise me. And not in a good way.

“La Société de Cinema is in Laos. Right next-door to Cambodia. We’ll now be dubbing a crapload of Laotian movies as well,” he finishes.

“Fuckit!” I accidentally say out loud.

“You have a problem with this, Cotton?” the Right Whale shouts across the room at me.

“No, sorry, I . . . ah . . . got my finger caught in the chair,” I fib.

“You sure it wasn’t your dick?” he cracks and then guffaws at his own joke. Others laugh to humor and/or suck up to him, but most of them give me the pathetic sideways “You poor dude” look.

So everything is humming along superbly both at work and at home. I have my dream job and my dream boss, my dream wife and my dream home and the only one I would truly take a bullet for at this point is Murray. I think Charlotte and I need to have a child to glue us back together. A little girl like her or a little dude like me (okay, not completely like me: a better version of me—with normal-sized ears) that we can worship, idolize, and fawn over and who will unite us through our mutual love of this perfect baby trinket. Of course this is possibly the worst reason in the world to procreate: to save a marriage. Shouldn’t there be a book or a video or some type of tutorial that helps ignorant doofuses like us, with young, highly fertile wombs and testicles, to steer clear of making appalling choices like this?

Luckily for everyone involved and the as-yet-unconceived baby, my wife is just as adamant now as she was when we first got hitched that she is not going to screw up her life, her body, and her wonderfully healthy narcissism by having a “fucking kid.”

As it turns out, thank God. But right now, I am heartbroken about it. Good-bye, little girl in pink that will never be. Who will never call me “Daddy” or look at me like I am perfect. Good-bye, little Horatio Jr., son of mine. We will not be flying kites on the beach together in this life or playing catch on the front lawn after school. I’m kidding about the name, of course. I would never have done that to the little guy. But my biological clock’s alarm must have rung loud and clear at some point, because I actually get misty-eyed when I think of the kids we will never have. I guess I really wanted kids. Who knew? I get depressed about it.

That is, until I come home really late one evening from work, having had a terrible day trying to get the American voice-over guy to say “I’m diabetic” so that it fits the Cambodian actor on screen as he mouths “K’nyom mee-un chum ngoo dteuk nom pha-em.” The “actor” on screen also has a gun to his head and he’s supposed to be scared (which he is faking badly), so he’s saying this phrase really slowly and nervously. We try and drag the English version out to make it match, you know, “Iiiiiiiii’mmmmm diiiiiiaaaabeeeetiiiiic”—but it just looks and sounds stupid, and for all my misgivings and shame about it, I do have some pride in my work. Obviously it’s an impossible task, but we do our best. I arrive home wondering at what point I will, by osmosis, be able to speak fluent Khmer. Tonight I certainly know how to say “I’m diabetic,” should I ever find myself in need of insulin while vacationing in Phnom Penh.