I Hate Everyone, Except You(43)
I guess you could say my visions were religious in nature, even though I am not what most religious people would call religious. I believe there’s a strong possibility that God exists. But I also believe there’s an equally strong possibility that God is a concept humans created because we didn’t understand things like gravity and lightning and DNA, and that we perpetuate because the thought of being one tiny speck out of billions of tiny specks on a large spherical mass orbiting a huge ball of fire, which is just one of immeasurable balls of fire out there in a pitch-black sky, is scary as fuck. And quite frankly, I don’t understand how anyone who has given the topic considerable, rational thought can be 100 percent certain either way. But that’s not important right now.
What’s important is my vision. I didn’t see Jesus in a waterfall or Buddha on an English muffin. One Sunday morning in the media room of our house in Connecticut I was watching This Week with George Stephanopoulos and witnessed something terrifying. It was Ted Cruz’s face. No, his whole head actually. Words were coming out of it, like a normal head on a talk show, but then it turned bright red, swelled to twice its size, collapsed in on itself, and morphed into something resembling a prolapsed anus. You can imagine the horror. One minute Ted Cruz was a US senator and presidential hopeful; the next a pulsating, crimson, gurgling sphincter. And George didn’t even bat an eye! That’s how I know God was letting me, and only me, in on a pretty substantial secret.
I went upstairs to the kitchen, where Damon was making poached eggs.
“Good timing,” he said. “These are almost done. Can you put the silverware on the table?”
“Sure,” I said and grabbed two forks and knives.
“Is everything all right?” he asked. “You have a weird look on your face.”
“Really? How so?”
“You look like you just smelled something really bad and can’t figure out where it’s coming from,” he said. “Remember that time we found the dead mouse in the sofa?”
“Yeah, that was gross.”
“Well, that’s your face.”
Over breakfast, I relayed what I saw, and Damon asked me how I knew what a prolapsed anus looked like. And so I had to explain how I had stumbled upon some photos of them a year or so ago during an innocent Google search. Well, maybe not completely innocent. I had been looking for images of Jon Hamm in tight pants.
“Wait,” Damon said. “Why were you searching for pictures of Jon Hamm in tight pants?”
“I was curious about the Hammaconda, obvi. But will you please let me finish?” You see, I continued, Jon Hamm stars in Mad Men, which is about an ad agency in the sixties, and Darren from Bewitched also worked at an ad agency in the sixties, and Darren was constantly derided by his mother-in-law, Endora, played by Agnes Moorehead, who made her on-camera acting debut in Citizen Kane as the mother of Charles Foster Kane, who died thinking about his childhood sled named Rosebud. And if you type “Rosebud” into the search bar, you’ll quickly learn it’s the slang term for an inside-out anal sphincter. And if you’re even slightly curious to see what one of those looks like, you will stumble upon images you can never fully expunge from your brain. Could happen to anyone, really.
The Ted Cruz visions continued and intensified as primary season approached, whipping me into a state of emotional distress. Every time I would turn on the news or engage in social media, there it was: the Satanic Rosebud, throbbing, pulsating, taunting and mocking me, threatening to swallow this great nation down its thorny gullet into a stinking pit of venomous bile. God was obviously speaking directly to me, but I wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was a sign, I figured, a sign to get as far away as possible. So I booked us a weeklong trip to Stockholm, reasoning that if Cruz were elected president of the United States, we could move there for four or—heaven forbid—eight years. No big deal. On paper Sweden seemed like the perfect place for us. Its people, for the most part, speak English, are immaculately clean, and appreciate a cute outfit from H&M. That’s pretty much me in a nutshell. We would go in mid-June for the summer solstice, I decided. Nineteen hours of sunlight!
On the flight over, Damon flipped through a Stockholm guidebook he had ordered online, pausing occasionally to ask me to remind him again why we might be moving to Sweden.
“Because Ted Cruz is the devil,” I said.
“You’ve mentioned that a few dozen times,” he replied. It was true. “But why can’t we live in Paris? We love Paris. And you’ve been wanting to brush up on your French.”
He was right. My French was very rusty, and I had been talking about enrolling in a two-week French immersion course in the south of France. But to be honest, the thought of actually going through with it gave me a migraine. “I’m getting too old to be fluent,” I said. “The best time to learn a language is during your formative years. I’ve been fully formed for a while now. At this point I’m well into the decay phase.”
“Okay,” Damon said. “How about Sydney? We love Sydney and you’ve been talking about surfing more.”
He was also right about that. The first time I tried surfing, in Hawaii, I turned out to be a little bit of a natural. I stood up on the board on my first attempt, rode a decent-sized wave, and impressed the hell out of my instructor. But to tell you the truth, I wasn’t too surprised. I had been passively training for twenty years on mass transit. If I can’t get a seat on the New York City subway, I stand, like everyone else. But I don’t like touching the pole with my bare hands because, well, cooties. So, I’ll just sort of stand there with my legs bent and my core engaged, and occasionally flail around like one of those inflatable air dancer things they have outside car washes.