Let's Pretend None Of This Is Going On

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My father asked me once, “Where will I find your book? Will it be up on the bestseller rack, or will I have to ask for it, wrapped in brown paper, from under the counter?”

“Neither,” I told him.

Last Sunday, at the café, my husband turned to the man at the next table—I was about to stand up and read a little—and he said, “He only writes about sex. It’s all dirty. Are you over 18?”

I have two names. One I keep shined for work; it pinches my toes and makes me limp when I walk. At work I must forever refer to my husband as my “roommate”. At work—a women-only school--I am sternly reminded that I must never romance my young and attractive students.

I must nod solemnly and promise to keep myself in check.

I am not allowed to say, ”The young ladies are safer with me than with a birch tree.”

I’m a dirty writer. As such, I am a constant recipient of sermonettes on monogamy, marriage and appropriate behavior.

I used to say that if I ever made a picture book of Tokyo, every picture would bear the caption, Let’s pretend none of this is going on.

Make that a picture book of the whole world.

I had a job at a pizza parlor once where my boss pestered me constantly for tales of sexual conquest. (What can I say? I was 23 and living in a place with sand dunes.) I told him tales and he’d stand there starry-eyed, his prick standing up beneath his apron.

He fired me for immorality.

I hereby warn the sermonizers. The next time I run into you at some place you said you’d never go, doing something you said you'd never ever do—I am not going to be understanding.

I’m going to raise a ruckus. I will press my hand to my chest and swoon. And when I wake up I will crawl across the floor whimpering, “Hypocrite? Hypocrite?”

The world won’t end if you tell the truth--and if it does end it wasn’t a world worth saving.

I’m a dirty writer. How entirely depraved.

”Not only does he do it, he talks about it!”

You are perhaps aware that we are in the midst of The Great Tokyo Popper Famine.

No poppers in Tokyo. They’ve been banned. Toss those poppers folks; they’re illegal.

My husband and I mentioned this recently to a visiting friend. He looked shocked that such a thing would even be mentioned. He said, “Oh well I would never.”

He was so shocked, apparently, that he left his knapsack behind in which, after a sniff, we found, secreted in multiple pockets, no fewer than eight bottles of poppers.

Eight! The man is downright inflammable!

Naturally we returned our dear friend’s bag immediately, but we did debate for quite awhile if we could perhaps keep a bottle or two of Rush or Jungle Juice, or Man Scent. It’s a famine. Poppers ought to be rationed.*

After all, he’d never think of using them. They’d been mystically teleported into his bag: a miraculous event akin to the virgin birth.

Were we within our rights?

I think there ought to be--for the first time in the history of the Earth—some kind of incentive plan for telling the truth.

But of course I think that. I’m a dirty writer.



(*Statements included herein should not be seen as encouragement to use Poppers of any brand or variety. Poppers are dangerous and illegal. Poppers are bad for you and me.)