“I’m going
to go on a hunger strike until you return,” I tell Lady, who has the temerity
to wander off to France for a month, for no good reason except that her husband
is French and her daughter is half-French. Soooooo?
“Montalvo,
are you going to join me in the hunger strike?” He’s joined us, my young son
and less-than-accomplished parrot purloiner, in walking Lady home, since we’re
savoring the farewell.
“I don’t
think so,” says Montalvo.
“Not the
right answer,” I tell him, “and if you’re going to be my son, you’ve got to
know when I’m talking nonsense, which is most of the time.”
“Yes,
Father,” he says.
“Father? That’s
what he calls you? I like that….”
“So do I,”
I tell her. She’s leaving for a month in three hours, and has she packed? Of
course not!
“It’s a
clear sign that you’re ambivalent,” I tell her. “It also completely portends
that you shouldn’t go. Montalvo, kidnap Lady.”
“OK, Dad….”
He’s picking it up nicely.
“Well, they
have stores in France,” I tell her.
“Yes, but
you need francs.”
Well, I
don’t have francs but I do have—thanks, Taí—one Trinidad and Tobago dollar, as
well as 40 Eastern Caribbean dollars. So I give her those, and she asks how
long they have been traveling in my wallet. Over a decade.
“Hey,
that’s wonderful! It’s got your energy! So every time I’m missing you, I’ll
just take out the money and smell you….”
“It won’t
be the same,” I tell her. I’m still having a hard time with it….
“Hey, can I
take your backpack with me? It would be perfect for a carry-on….”
Right—so
yesterday she had invited me to France—“hey, why don’t you come to
France with us…”—and now it’s my backpack. And how is my computer supposed to
get home?
So we
unload the backpack, discovering an uneaten cookie from March of 2013 (I know
this because the cookie was accompanied by a playbill), and guess what? In over
a year, the cookie was miraculously unscathed by any passing microbe. Should I eat
it? I decide no….
And now
Lady is telling us about her mother, who had given her a manila envelope to
open on the plane, since Lady was having major anxiety even thinking about
boarding the plane, much less being trapped in it for eight hours. So what was
in the envelope?
“It was
filled with clippings of airplane crashes! Can you believe it? There wasn’t
even a little note inside! She did it to get me to overcome my fear!”
“One tough
bitch,” says Montalvo, admiringly.
“It’s
simple,” I tell him. “We go to the hardware store, buy a padlock, and put it on
the gate to their apartment building.”
“But then
we’ll trap everybody in the building,” he points out.
“Not a
problem—we can throw hummus wraps up at their balconies,” I say. I learned to
think on my feet at Wal-Mart.
So now
we’re at her apartment building and does she have her keys? Of course not, but
she does her cell phone, as well as her husband in his underpants at home. So
he comes down, and I take a good look at him, since how often do you see Frenchmen
in their underpants? OK, maybe you do—and I bet Lady does—but I don’t….
“The fact
that you don’t have your keys is a clear indication—as well as a major
portent—of your ambivalence. You definitely shouldn’t go to France.”
“Don’t stop
saying that,” she cries, and then tries to get us to believe that she meant,
“Don’t! Stop saying that!” Ha! Montalvo and I aren’t buying it.
“What’s
ambivalence?” asks Montalvo, a definite candidate for vocabularial
supplementation. So we jog through the park of “ambi” words, and then begin to
make up new words.
“Ambisexual,”
I tell him. “There definitely should be an ‘ambisexual.’”
“But what
would it mean?”
“Of both
sexes,” I tell him. And then we meet Carlos, in full pirate regalia, who
invites us to join him in his piratical pursuits: some days he makes ten bucks!
“I still
can’t believe what Nico told me,” says Montalvo, “back there when we were
saying goodbye.”
“What was
that?”
“So I’m
kissing Lady, and giving her your backpack and what does Nico say? He looks at
me and says, ‘Don’t get arrested!’ Son of a bitch! I want to kick him in the
face, the bastard.”
I can’t
help laugh, and then consider—would a good father do that? So I throw him a
bone.
“Don’t
worry,” I tell him.
“He can’t
help it,” I say.
“He’s just
French….”
Can you believe it? Lady deserted us for THIS???
