But at least you’re not fat from taking antidepressants. Roz did a powerful show on weight gain and antidepressants. People start taking Zoloft or Paxil and they blimp out — they put on forty pounds of belly fat immediately. Plus they lose their joy in sex, and they’re addicted to the pills, and if they try to go off them because they don’t like being fat and want to have a few solid orgasms, they experience awful neural symptoms called “brain zaps” or “brain shivers.” Ugh.
Was there a hit song there? “Brain shivers, I’ve got the chills. Brain shivers, can’t get off the pills.” Possibly, with the right bassline.
• • •
I WENT OUT to the parking lot and discovered that I’d locked my keys in the Kia. I could see them dangling below the steering wheel. That’s the second time this year that I’ve locked myself out of my car, plus three dead-battery jumps. It’s pure absentmindedness, fat-headedness, and there’s no excuse for it. I called AAA and told the woman my problem. She said, “I can help you with that.” However, because I’d used up all my free service calls it would cost me forty dollars. I said I understood. She said the truck would be there in half an hour. Triple A works just the way real insurance should work, pooling many payers to help out unfortunate fools like me with their infrequent crises. Health insurance can’t work like that, because, as Prince said, we’re all going to die. Health insurance is doomed, because everyone is doomed and everyone can’t pay for everyone’s needless colonoscopy and preventive polyp removal. This and Obama’s wars may bring down the government. If a collapse comes, followed by hyperinflation, we’ll suffer and get thin and there won’t be so many academic departments of creative writing. Please just ignore this tiresome politicizing.
I went back inside. It happened to be bagel morning at Planet Fitness, and the bagels were going fast. I love onion bagels, and everything bagels, even though it hurts my jaw to chew them. They help me think, and I was famished. I toasted an everything bagel after hacking it apart with a plastic knife, and while I was waiting for it to brown I listened to Whitney Houston sing “I Wanna Dance with Somebody.” I carved out a generous wodge of cream cheese and spread it around and went outside to lean against my trunk. I chewed and listened with awe and an odd kind of patriotism to Whitney’s Super Bowl performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner” while I admired the unusual Portsmouth mist. The best everything bagels come frozen from New York City, but these were quite good. What makes an everything bagel great, even better than a cigar, is the almost burned bits of onion. The crunchy, sweet, bitter bits of tiny onion asteroids taste beyond-words good. They help a lot if you’ve drunk too much Yukon Jack the night before, but I’m finding that they help even if you haven’t. I haven’t had anything to drink in more than a month and I feel great. Caramelization is the great achievement of cooking.
I sent a text to Roz. “Just hoping you’re feeling okay — also sad news, Nan’s mother (next-door neighbor Nan) died.” Nan and Roz hadn’t been close friends, but they liked each other.
The Triple A man arrived at 7:51. The radio was going in his truck before he shut off the motor. He used a technique I hadn’t seen before. With a rubber bulb he inflated the gap between the door and the car and then he angled a long metal tool in. But instead of trying to get a purchase on the clicker’s indentation to pry it upward, he reached farther. I thought he was going to try to open the door by pulling on the door handle, and I said, “I’m afraid this isn’t a car that unlocks automatically when you pull the inside handle.”
“I’m going to unroll the window,” he said drily.
“That’s brilliant,” I said. I looked in through the window on the other side and watched the clawed chicken foot of his metal tool pushing and pulling the window handle around. It took him a long time, but eventually he got the window open enough to get his arm in, and then he pulled on the lock and opened the door.
“Fantastic,” I said.
He tapped his head. “You’ve got to keep thinking.”
He was a young kid with a beard, retro-hippie-ish but with an official AAA shirt on, recently graduated from the University of New Hampshire. I flipped open my wallet and gave him a twenty from the back of my stash, where the twenties usually hide. I couldn’t afford it, but it’s important to give credit where credit is due.
“What kind of songs do you listen to when you’re driving?” I asked.
“The Cowboy Junkies,” he said. “They’ve got a song called ‘Common Disaster.’ Also I like Ben Taylor. He’s the son of James Taylor and Carly Simon.”
“Thanks for telling me.”
I scribbled “Common Disaster” and “Ben Taylor” on my folded-up piece of paper. Then I wrote “everything bagel” and “You’ve got to keep thinking”—maybe they could be songs.
Twenty-six
MY JAW ACHES, and a drowsy numbness pains my sense. The cigar smoking is not good for it. It’s not the jaw it once was, and I’ll tell you what happened. In freshman year of high school, when I played basketball, I knew this kid named Ronnie who was a master dribbler. He had many tricky dribbles, but there was a certain move that worked every time — a low double-bounce feint, performed inches above the floor, that threw you off when you were trying to block his shot. I admired him very much even before we played basketball together, because of how well he drummed on his algebra textbook.
And the interesting thing about him, which I found out in gym class, was that he was missing a pectoral muscle. I don’t know if he’d been born without it, or if he’d had it removed, but it wasn’t there. He could drum in patterns I’d never heard before, and he could turn in the air and make a basket from half a mile away, and he did all this with only one pectoral muscle. Once he said, matter-of-factly, “Black people are just better than white people. They’re better at all sports, they sing better, they climb the rope higher, they run the hurdles faster, they win at the Olympics. They’re just better at everything.” And I thought, He’s absolutely right about that. Even so, I wanted to learn how to do his double-bounce trick.
I watched his moves carefully at practice, and then I went off to a far corner of the gym to try the double dribble. I thought I had it, or a close approximation of it, but a few days later, when I tried it in a game, I did something wrong. I bent low, feinted, double-dribbled, and the basketball came up fast and hit me in the jaw. I felt something go pop. It was extremely painful. Tears obscured my vision. Somebody grabbed the ball and I backed away from the action to recover. The pain was all over the right side of my head.
It didn’t go away. At inter-high band practice on Saturday morning we were playing a piece by Vincent Persichetti and an arrangement of Santana’s “Black Magic Woman.” My jaw hurt too much to play, but I pretended by frowning and putting my lips loosely on the reed. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t making any sound — the bassoon part was doubled by the bass clarinets and the baritone saxes. At Youth Orchestra on Sunday we spent an hour on The Pines of Rome, by Respighi, and I faked playing there, too, saving myself for the exposed passage near the beginning of Afternoon of a Faun. I had trouble eating a Ry-Krisp when I got home. I gave my jaw two days of rest, but then I had to practice a Milde étude for my lesson on Thursday.