At Café des Artistes

And then she said, “Goddamn it, Fred!”

Hey, Brett, you smell like an adult!

Who wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest?
Cuckoo’s Nest? I was in it.
You’re still in it, Bob.

At Major Market

Most Californians live without a budget. The only reason they’re upset about the legislature’s failure to pass a budget is because someone told them to be upset.

At a writers workshop

My mother used to say, “Don’t laugh too much. You’ll cry in the morning.

Read more Fallbrookisms…

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

“Are you OK?” the surgeon asked her, out in the hallway.

What a question. I surveyed the faces in the institutionally furnished waiting room. No one else reacted. Not one focus strayed from the droning television. No sympathetic shrugs. Not a twitchy eyebrow on those feigning sleep. It was odd. Lack of compassion, maybe? Or perhaps they were too busy with their own fears and hopeful distractions. But I heard him. I couldn’t pretend I didn’t — because she was not the patient, because a busy surgeon bothered to ask, because the question was so miserably revealing.

At least he had taken her to the hallway. Not like the other nincompoops.

Earlier, emerging from the mighty O.R. to deign to a visit with the peons, one doctor strutted in, eyeballed the woman seated at the far wall (the one who had studiously avoided contact with the rest of us, securing her privacy in the depths of a large paperback book wedged hard against her abdomen), and he proceeded to hold court from the middle of the room.

He proclaimed, “Mrs. Bassini, you will be pleased to hear your husband is the lucky recipient of a successful hernia repair. He’ll be up and about in a few days, but, of course, you two should not engage in sexual activity for a couple weeks, maybe three.”

The wife’s tightly tidy appearance suggested she had not been inclined to engage in sexual activity with her husband since well before his little eruption; that, or behind closed doors she became a deliciously dangerous pressure cooker of raging corned beef and cabbage drenched in the salty juices of love. Either way, she now kept her eyes straight ahead, painfully avoiding the rest of us — a reluctant audience to the intimate details of her marriage.

“You can see him in recovery in about an hour,” the surgeon concluded on his way out.

“Thank—,” the wife began but didn’t finish as the last bit of green scrubs disappeared past the door jam. Her color rose as she bowed into her book, eyes unmoving.

I squirmed on her behalf. It was the least I could do.

The takes-the-cake doc, though, was the second one of the morning. He plopped right down in the seat between the young cowboy and me.

I had seen Cowboy on my way into the hospital. He and his gal were flirting in the parking lot by the genital-red pickup that was bigger than my living room. I assumed the truck was a tip that Cowboy was dangling something significantly smaller.

He sauntered into the waiting room after me, his lower lip swollen with chaw, a half-gallon milk jug for a spittoon, and his ten-gallon hat pulled low, demonstrating, as my mother would have said, that he had been hit by the uncouth stick. “A gentleman removes his hat indoors and in the presence of a lady,” she had taught us.

Cowboy did not honor that rule. Although in his defense, waiting room etiquette was ill-defined beyond pretending not to hear others’ conversations — a tall order around here. But I guessed Cowboy might fall short of any standard of etiquette, because the next thing he did was make a spitty brown deposit in his cuspidor, and then he plunked the ptooey container smack in the middle between his polished cowboy boots, spread his knees wide to reveal a noticeably worn patch of denim, and settled in for the wait.

I imagined an Old West directional sign dropping from the ceiling, hand pointing to Cowboy’s crotch. His confident posture caused me to rethink my original assumption about his endowment.

His little lady joined us shortly after the sign dropped, and she was packing a saddlebag of hostility. Levis you couldn’t have removed with a potato peeler, a homemade bleach job abusing her hair, and tattoos from head to swishing tail. The barbed wire encircling her firm biceps was a particularly nice touch. And, like Cowboy, Barbie’s bottom lip was packed as tight with chaw as her jeans with flesh. She, however, fancied a more feminine spittoon, squirting her brown spittle into a sports drink bottle.

Once again, however, my initial impression was squashed when she promptly settled in with the growing group of ambulatory care visitors to enjoy The Price Is Right with Drew Carey, applauding correct answers and commiserating over the failures.

“Sucks without old whatshisname,” Barbie said as another young woman walked in.

The newcomer smiled at everyone and cheered, “Hey, Price Is Right — cool! I love this show! And yeah, Bob Barker was great, wasn’t he? He seemed like a pretty nice guy.”

She sat down across from me laughing, apparently enthused to find kindred fans. Her olive skin and ebony hair shone in the room that had been doused in tones so bland they could not be identified. In the friendly village of Fallbrook, she was probably pegged as Mexican, but she appeared to hail from more Caribbean climes.

I smiled, mumbled something encouraging about the good old days, and figured Puerto Rico, maybe, as she chattered on with Barbie, laughing about past shows and special guests, about the time she took her mama to see the show’s taping — and they’d had so much fun in L.A.

And that’s when the second surgeon came in, plopping his well-fed derriere in the seat buffering me from Cowboy.

“Your wife’s doing fine,” he said, curling his lip at the jug. “I cleaned her out, got it all — uterus, tubes and ovaries.” He relaxed into the seat, looking pleased, and threw his arm across its back and into my space. I leaned forward, but he didn’t seem to notice. “Everything’s gone, and that should help with the pain. She is going to have some bleeding. If she saturates more than two sanitary pads in six or eight hours, call my office. Otherwise, she should be just fine.” Cowboy spit into his jug and the idiot doctor leaned into my lap without dropping a beat. “No worries — I did a good job, so I’m not expecting any problems. She’ll be in recovery a few more hours, but you can probably take her home by dinnertime. We like to get them up and running pretty quickly. I’ll need to see her in one week — and no sexual activity for four weeks, maybe more.”

I couldn’t help myself. I looked over to Ms. Puerto Rico, and — glory be! — she looked back, pursed her lips and rolled her eyes, nodding in Idiot Doc’s direction.

“The nurse will let you know when you can come in and see her,” Idiot Doc finished and rose, bumping my shoulder as he swept his arm back into his own space. He didn’t seem to notice that, either.

While we attempted to stifle our reactions to Cowboy’s barren news, a sweetly fragile voice trilled from an elderly woman in the corner, opening her eyes for the first time. “It’ll be OK, young man,” she said, pushing a tendril of white hair back into her loose bun and patting the wrinkles in her frayed housedress.

“Yes, Ma’am,” Cowboy nodded in her direction.

“I had a hysterectomy fifty years ago, before they knew what they were doing down there,” she chuckled, “and it wasn’t too long before I felt just fine.” She leaned over to pull up a tube sock, rumpled round her bruised and withered ankle. Her slant revealed an unfettered bosom as flat as the plates of a mammography machine. “You thank God you still have her, and you adopt. That’s what I always say.” She chuckled herself back into a doze.

I wondered if adoption was a good idea, given Cowboy’s Barbie. Then I figured the biological drive to procreate was a lot stronger than any social convention. And then I decided it was time to take a break. I headed out for caffeine.

The way to the tiny cafeteria was lined with a rogue’s gallery of former community hospital board members, some of them, familiar faces — the brilliant, Jewish lesbian neurologist who finally left town because none of the local practitioners would refer to her; the community gadfly whose penchant for Bermudas without underwear left his elderly gonads notoriously flapping in the breeze on the boardroom dais; the unwed deputy sheriff whose tanned, lean body inspired a generation of hopeful beauties into civic involvement; the recovered cancer patient who abstained from attending meetings, but gobbled up the free healthcare benefits he couldn’t buy if he wanted to. Typical small town fare, each mug shot was a fading scandal.

At least they led to coffee.

“Where are the coffee cups?” I asked at the cafeteria’s counter.

“Next to the coffee machine,” a slight figure facing the grill said without turning.

“Oops, sorry! Didn’t see them. My eyes took a hike with my youth.” No comment from the grill, as I poured some coffee into a Styrofoam cup just large enough for Holy Communion. Then I searched for half-and-half, couldn’t find it, searched again without success, and reluctantly asked, “And the cream?”

A skinny arm, doubled in length by a spatula, pointed to the far end of the counter. “In the ice,” she said from the shadows of the grill’s hood.

I followed the cafeteria tray rails to the ice, where yogurt, milk cartoons and a stainless steel tub of coffee whitener laid half buried. Whitener, not cream, a distinction it seemed unsafe to make under the circumstances, so I whitened my coffee and asked, “How much is it?”

The short order cook looked over her boney shoulder and peered up at me. She was all hairnet and sorrow, pressing a grilled cheese sandwich into submission, maybe the only power she had. “Never been here before?”

“Just to wait, not for coffee.” I smiled, a paltry cover for the fact that I knew I was annoying the hell out of her.

But then an amazing thing happened. She released the sandwich and turned straight to me, her hands resting on her semblance of hips and a smile usurping her unhappy face.

“Well then, here’s your good news for the day, Sugar,” she said, suddenly animated and beaming. “It’s free!”

“Free? Really? That’s nice!”

“Yep. Coffee, tea and ice water,” she said in a singsong voice, “all free, all the time!” as though it was the most important — the happiest! — damn message she had ever delivered.

I wondered if I should take her home with me and fatten her up in front of Fried Green Tomatoes, give her a chance to discover greater pleasures in life. But having done her duty well, she returned to subduing the grilled cheese. And she was whistling.

I wandered back to the waiting room, reading the signs along the way that repeated every ten steps or so, directing me to cough into the crook of my arm and wash my hands obsessively to prevent the spread of influenza.

With the image of a germ-riddled milk jug in mind, I stepped into the room to find all the same faces, some reading, some chatting, some dozing at the TV, some staring off into a fearful distance.

Ms. Puerto Rico said, “Hi,” as I returned to the seat that had become mine.

Cowboy welcomed me back by spitting into his  jug and placing it in the empty seat between us. He had apparently tired of bending over to reach the floor.

Ms. Puerto Rico cleared her throat and looked at me, her nostrils flaring in disgust, and I had to laugh despite the brown muck perched twenty inches to the right of my thigh.

“Hey, who’re you here with?” she asked.

“My daughter, but it’s a simple procedure, no biggy.” I shifted as far left as the chair allowed. “And you?”

“My mama. But she didn’t tell me anything, just that she had to have a little procedure and needed a ride home.”

“Wow! That must be disconcerting.”

“Oh, it’s the way she is. She says God has more important things to do than listen to us complain, so she never shares any of the bad stuff. What can I do? I just wait for her to nudge out her stories in little pieces, but she’s always pretty cheerful anyway.” She laughed and shook her head.

“Is that where you get it?” I asked, and she laughed again.

“Yeah, Mama’s Puerto Rican. She says Puerto Rican women are resilient — and they love to laugh.”

“And they love to cook,” I offered. “At least my former in-laws did. They made the best Puerto Rican food — pasteles and fried plantains are my favorites.”

“And chicharrones — we’ve got to have our fried pork skin!” and Ms. Puerto Rico was laughing yet again when another surgeon came in the door.

“The daughter of Mrs. Santiago?” he asked.

“That’s me.” Ms. Puerto Rico turned to smile at him.

He gestured toward the hallway and said, “Let’s talk out here.”

Everyone looked at Ms. Puerto Rico.

Her laughter stopped. Her smile stopped. She stood and followed him out.

The doc said something about “bronchoscopy” and maybe “sooner” and “Are you OK?”

There was a pause, and then, “Yes, thank you, I’m fine,” and after a silent moment, she was standing in the doorway. “Hey, where’d you get that coffee?”

“I’ll show you.” I jumped up and walked into the hallway with her, my arm around her shoulders. “It’s down this way.”

“At least he didn’t say she couldn’t have sex,” she laughed, and then she turned into me, and she wept. And when she could, she whispered, “She never told us, not a word. … And she’ll just say that Puerto Rican women are resilient. … And they love to laugh. … We do love to laugh. We do. …

“Hey,” she stood straight, “I could use that coffee.”

“Well, the good news is it’s free — coffee, tea and ice water — all free, all the time, Sweetie. I’m Patsy. What’s your name?”

©2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

At Fallbrook Art Center

Gray-haired volunteer: Queenie? We used to sing a song about a Queenie — Queenie the cutie of the burlap show. I didn’t know what a burlesque show was.

Note: The song is Strip Polka by Johnny Mercer.

At a writers workshop

My character grew a second head!

– Marcy

Fallbrook Drum Circle with Hula Hoops — Sunday!

Hula hoops?!

Yep, the Fallbrook Drum Circle will meet Sunday 25 July at 3:00 p.m. in Village Square (at the corner of Main and Alvarado) — and they are introducing hula hoops to join with the rhythm of the drums.

If you have a hula hoop, bring it — along with any other instruments you have.

The circle will also begin a new drum raffle, which helps keep the event free and offers a good chance to win a drum.

For directions or information, call Tom at Rainbow Designs, 760-723-1899.

Read more Fallbrookisms…

On Fallbrook’s medical community

Mother 1: The ob-gyn tried to deliver an anti-abortion lecture during my kid’s exam.
Mother 2: Maybe it was just business development.

At Café des Artistes — on Sofia Coppola’s film Marie Antoinette

Patron 1: Was Marie Antoinette bisexual in the movie? Did she go after the handmaidens?
Patron 2: Not in that movie.
Patron 1: She did in my movie.
Patron 2: The one in your head?

Read more Fallbrookisms…

At Café des Artistes
Bob: I’ve turned groveling into a strength.

A political conversation
Tree service: I’ll be by to take a look at your tree in about an hour, hour and a half.
K-B: Great, thanks.
Tree service: You betcha.
K-B: Are you related to Sarah?
Tree service: Who?

At Major Market
There are no perfect people. There are certainly no perfect politicians.

– Said by President Bill Clinton at Senator Robert Byrd’s memorial service and quoted in the Major Market parking lot

Read more Fallbrookisms…

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

Reading Internet search terms is as compelling an experience as reading a good novel. I discovered this when my dear, darling website designer did a software thingy I don’t understand, something involving computer magic that captures the search terms that land folks on my site. I will be forever indebted and disconcerted.

The words people type into search engines are varyingly mysterious, obvious, enlightening, funny, sad, perverse, disturbing, frightening and occasionally idiotic. And many of them are just odd enough — or grotesque enough — that I am forced to repeat the search to determine why in the name of whatever the term brought the searcher to my cyber door.

Just last week, an unidentifiable degenerate searched for “7to9 boys/nude.” After learning from the local Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force that there’s not much they can do without an IS address, I added the search to the list I obsessively keep and wondered if, given human history, pedophilia could be a distant point on the natural order spectrum. Then I gnoshed on the satisfying notion of cruel and unusual punishment.

Such extreme examples aside, a public review of incoming searches might be interesting, perhaps entertaining, or maybe it will actually encourage folks to think twice before they google something really stupid. So, for your reading pleasure, here are the first one hundred searches that brought folks to ExcuseMeImWriting.com.

1.  vibes – domestic violence

2.  what do most people do for a living in afghanistan

3.  Fallbrook magic mushroom

4.  i lift my leafy arms to pray

5.  dove bullets

6.  fear of feminism

7.  victor villasenor and gays

8.  kids morning ablutions

9.  rural kids barefoot

10. i’m a physician and my hands are killing

11. old insane asylums

12. dirty sex words signs and stickers

13. baby be-bop controversy

14. academics vs athletics

15. tomato in the trees

16. beast – profanity?

17. chuck norris 1

18. chuck norris side view

19. dangerous angels

20. is population a excuse for no healthcare

21. jaghori

22. fears about women turn of the century

23. yes! sticker

24. who do i call to oppose health care reform

25. frankau

26. fotos de trupianos bistro in fallbrook

27. feminism quotes in 2009

28. fight in parking lot

29. attention whore sticker

30. woman beaten at suffrage parade 1913

31. me

32. 1920′s insane asylum texas

33. women’s fear of feminism

34. the mel sanger lies

35. obama is the antichrist

36. Hospice dying

37. fear of feminism

38. why is baby be-bop a bad book

39. san diego poetry readings

40. hospice dying

41. Tillman gressitt

42. Creative rainbow

43. writing about typical morning

44. what do most people do for a job in afghanistan

45. who do i call for health care reform

46. Leftover soap chips

47. chuck norris struck lighting

48. chuck norris tough

49. 2009 for marriage yoga for gamini

50. chuck norris gay

51. Don’t be gaycist

52. Fear of feminism

53. who do you call for help with child care

54. Father’s love

55. baby bop’s tea set margaret

56. fear of feminism equal rights amendment

57. can i work overseas and still get california unemployment

58. “pat robertson” married pregnant girlfriend

59. “sarah palin” and “short skirts”

60. individual and typical qualities of chuck norris

61. who do you call when someone is crazy

62. book store in fallbrook, ca

63. religious medical excuse

64. explain health reform bill

65. “women’s equality day” anti Christian

66. can edd find out that im attending college

67. dying mother

68. woman on toilet seat

69. palin writing ability

70. no jews in fallbrook

71. Reasonable excuses for turning in a late…

72. The nice part of living in a small town

73. Excuse for sending late continued claim form

74. Homily minding your own business

75. Health care reform legislation explain

76. Jaghori afghanistan

77. Fathers accused of child abuse

78. How to get father off child abuse charge

79. How to write an excuse me letter

80. EDD federal extension

81. Excuse me seventeen club free

82. Checked wrong box on California unemployment

83. Have interview with edd for sending form

84. Pictures of young homeless addicts

85. Fallbrook racism

86. Fallbrook the friendly village

87. Child abuse

88. Give heed

89. Homeless trucker gay

90. turn of the century intellectuals

91. Submitting your work to MOMA

92. How to get a judge to excuse parent

93. What do I click on in Word that tells me

94. What do the Afghan people want?

95. Fallbrook girls looking to party

96. Fallbrook mayor

97. Fallbrook lychee fruit

98. Fallbrook youth prevention group

99. Writers Read Fallbrook

100. Ann Coulter evil

If you’re curious, you can copy and paste any of the terms into the search window at the top of this page and see what the search engine picked up. Have fun. …

Love,
K-B

©2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

At the Writing Erotic workshop

The only male student: If men could see a videotape of what happened here tonight, they would be able to get all the sex they want.

Facilitator: What did you like and not like about the workshop?
Student: It was good for me!
Facilitator: Cigarette?

On taking a Fallbrook yoga class

I not sure about yoga: It always makes me feel like I need to clear my chakra or poo, and I’m not sure which.

Read more Fallbrookisms…

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

Mama, what do angels look like?

This, my small kiddo asks. In the throes of divorce. Of making a game of beans and rice. Of sorrow. Of innocent query and wonderment. This she asks.

How shall I answer? What can I say that would not be a lie passing my lips?

In the speckled dark of a sleepless, starry sky, I sit on our hill as she chases shadows in the warm breeze and a coyote pauses beyond the fence that separates us.

The hill is ours because we love it. I think it loves us. It makes paths for us around the rabbit holes, the tarantula borrows, the grainy mounds of queens and workers in constant toil.

The People say it is a holy place; the altitude puts it a peedy bit closer to the gods.

But I am distracted from the possibility of clutching a deity’s apron strings by whispered anguish calling to me from places I cannot pronounce and some I can.

Will sea turtles discover crude oil lends their shells a fine sheen? Will tar balls become the tender of shrimpers and oyster folk? Will children who play with spent artillery shells transcribe the booming rhythm of war into the next amazing rap sensation?

I search for hope amidst the moonlit carpet of rabbit turds, brown and rich, the prickly stubble of deer grass, recently shaved by a peon’s scythe, the manzanilla, its soothing ways unrecognized in the wild by those who buy it by the box.

The moon catches my girl, catches her dark curls and darker eyes, twirling into a glowing tornado, spiraling up toward the night, up into a future I fret I cannot affect, and my fear pulls her back to earth.

The coyote howls across the hill, and answers echo from a distant canyon. I peer through the grasses to watch her, stymied by the impassable chain-link fence. A border to me, it cuts her world in half. And so she paces, her prey on the other side.

And I chew a manzanilla bud, and rub the tender skin beneath my skirt. The grass makes me itch. It makes me itch because I love to scratch. And so I scratch as I look out over my little town. Indeed it is mine, because we scratch each other.

Why do I love it so here? How dare I raise my child in this place? This place of bitter anger and sweet Peruvian chocolate. Of testicle trees, our avocados, and shocking scarlet bottlebrushes. Of well-repressed, grey-green groves and lusciously chaotic words wending their way behind closed doors, between tussled sheets, into fearful hearts.

The heat of conflict radiates from our bodies, our beds, our lands, entangling the legs of a bawdy blend. And I wonder, what’s not to love?

I lie in the dry grass, caressing the stars, eyes languid and wet, and I sense the loss of something, something I might not have ever wanted.

The coyote, impatient with human encumbrances, glances at us and trots across the border to dine and commune with her own. I applaud her hopeful vision.

My kiddo, delighted with discovering her ability to dance, moves deeper into the dark.

Angels? I call.

Oh, never mind, Mama. I just saw one!

And she spins, spins into the sweeping night. Soars out of reach. She is gone. Gone.

Love,
K-B

© 2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

This piece is crossposted at The Progressive Post.

Note: Painting by Kate Gressitt-Diaz.

Fallbrookians on…

Immigration It’s the hypocrisy of our times. Probably 90 percent of our senators have hired illegal aliens.

— Local employer

Education We do want to take away some people’s individuality.

— Former school board member

Fun I won’t play anything I can’t change.

— Anonymous

The Bonsall Bridge The old Bonsall Bridge was a rite of passage for new drivers. Now it’s replaced with a chunk of concrete — no challenge at all.

— 1993 comment resurrected in 2010 as another, larger chunk of concrete slowly becomes the next bridge

Hoochies Ooo, mine is showing. Want to cover up with my rebozo? No, I’m proud of my vagina.

— A mother-daughter moment

Defining Fallbrook

The town of a thousand only Democrats

Off the main drag culturally and psychologically

Blue-haired ladies with private greenhouses

Provincials trying to hide behind their oleander hedges

The Universe Is Like a Good Restaurant

The universe is like a good restaurant
The chef is God
The waiters and waitresses are angels
And they’re all here to serve you

And you –
You’re either seated at a table
Or you’re on the menu

— By the late Al Einhorn

Read more Fallbrookisms…