David Sedaris - Barrel Fever and Other Stories

Over Christmas we looked through boxes of family pictures and played a game we call "Find Mom, find Mom's cigarettes." There's one in every picture. We've got photos of her pregnant, leaning toward a lit match, and others of her posing with her newborn babies, the smoke forming a halo above our heads. These pictures gave us a warm feeling.

She smoked in the bathtub, where we'd find her drowned butts lined up in a neat row beside the shampoo bottle. She smoked through meals, and often used her half-empty plate as an ashtray. Mom's theory was that if you cooked the meal and did the dishes, you were allowed to use your plate however you liked. It made sense to us.

Even after she was diagnosed with lung cancer she continued to smoke, although less often. On her final trip to the hospital, sick with pneumonia, she told my father she'd left something at home and had him turn the car around. And there, standing at the kitchen counter, she entertained what she knew to be her last cigarette. I hope that she enjoyed it.

It never occurred to any of us that Mom might quit smoking. Picturing her without a cigarette was like trying to imagine her on water skis. Each of us is left to choose our own quality of life and take pleasure where we find it, with the understanding that, like Mom used to say, "Sooner or later, something's going to get you."

Something got me the moment I returned home from work and Hugh delivered his interpretation of the EPA report. He told me that I am no longer allowed to smoke in any room that he currently occupies. Our apartment is small four tiny rooms.

I told him that seeing as I pay half the rent, I should be al-lowed to smoke half the time we're in the same room. He agreed, on the condition that every time I light a cigarette, all the windows must be open.

It's cold outside.

"WRITERS! Have fun while earning a few extra bucks writing erotica!Giantess magazine needs stories about gals who grow to gigantic proportions! Send sample of work to D.L. Publications."

I circled that ad in this morning's paper and left it lying on my desk while I went to work, staining the bookcases of an art director. This man had, among other artifacts, a pair of delicate porcelain plates, each picturing a single sperm making its reckless journey toward an egg. By mid-afternoon this man had only one such plate. It wasn't necessarily our fault; it just sort of happened. The woman I was working with thought we should leave a confessional note but I thought it might be a better idea to tell him that a squirrel had come in the window, jumped on the dresser, smashed the plate, and left as suddenly as it had arrived. I thought we should scratch the surface of the dresser to suggest destructive claw marks. Lili decided it might be better for her to blame it all on me, seeing as the client was a friend of her brother. That was how we left it.

I came home and wrote a letter toGiantess magazine, including a story I had written several years ago. I don't happen to have any giantess stories lying around the house so I sent them something about a short man, hoping they might recognize size as a theme.

I worked today for Marilyn Notkin, stripping the paint off her bedroom windows with a heat gun. I was at it for half an hour when I blew a fuse, at which point I set down my heat gun and headed downstairs to the basement fuse box. On my way back to Marilyn's I popped into the first-floor apartment and joined Kim in watching a few minutes of "Oprah." This morning Oprah's guests were people who had forgiven the unforgivable. One woman had testified on behalf of the man who had stabbed her twenty times. Another had embraced the drunk driver who killed her only son. She invites this fellow over to her house for holidays and Sunday dinners.

"He's like a second son to me now," she said, reaching over to take his hand. "I wouldn't trade Craig for anything." The felon stared at his feet and shrugged his shoulders. I was thinking that a lengthy prison sentence would probably be a lot more comfortable than having to take the place of the person you had killed. I thought it was funny and was laughing when I heard, in the distance, a high-pitched whine like a car alarm but no, not a car alarm. It was shrill and relentless and I was trying to identify it when I remembered the heat gun and ran upstairs to Marilyn's bedroom, where the flaming windowsill had just set fire to the sheer white curtains.

The smoke alarm was screaming and I froze for a moment, watching the curtains change color. And then I was hugging them to my chest and pawing the flames with my hands. I wasn't even thinking, I was so afraid. The fire died in my hands and afterwards, desperately trying to cover my tracks, I wondered what I might say to someone after burning down their house.

"No, I mean it, I'm really, really sorry and just to prove it I'm not going to charge you for today's work. My treat."

The editor of Giantess called to say he'd received my letter and thinks I might have potential. He introduced himself as Hank, saying, "I liked your story, Dave, but for Giantess you'll need to drop the silly business and get straight to the turn-on if you know what I mean. Do you understand what I'm talking about here, Dave?" Hank told me his readers are interested in women ranging anywhere from ten to seventy-five feet tall and take their greatest delight in the physical description of a giantess outgrowing her clothing. "Do you know what I'm talking about, Dave? I need tohear those clothes splitting apart. Do you think you can do that for me?"

It seemed to be something I might be capable of. Hank offered to send me a few back issues and I said it sounded good to me. Later in the afternoon I took a walk to the grocery store, wondering what might cause a woman to grow to such proportions. I think it must be terribly lonely to stand seventy-five feet tall. You'd have no privacy and every bowel movement would evacuate entire cities. What would you eat? A roast chicken would be the size of a peanut. You might put away five dozen but leave with the feeling you were only snacking.

I am working this week on the Upper East Side, assisting a decorative painter named Jeffrey Lee. The clients are renovating their fifteen-room apartment on Fifth Avenue, converting one of the bedrooms into a bathroom for their dogs. I had never in my life witnessed such wealth until this afternoon when Jeffrey and I had lunch in the apartment of the project's interior decorator. I was amazed by the splendor: a Sargent painting in the drawing room, a small Bosch propped up in the kitchen room after room filled with treasures. The decorator wasn't home so Jeffrey and I had lunch in the kitchen with an estimator and three burly men who had come to replace the dining room windows. I expected that we would sit together and marvel at the grandeur, but instead Jeffrey Lee made a phone call and the men talked shop window talk, the dullest shoptalk on earth.

"What do you think about those one-and-three-quarter seamless pane liners?" one of the men asked. "I worked with those up on East Eighty-Fourth and, let me tell you, they're a pain in the ass to hoist, but the bastards glaze like you wouldn't believe."

"Hell," another man said, tugging at his T-shirt. "I wouldn't give you two cents for a Champion Eight. I'd rather double-pane three-quarter Stets any day of the week they're worth two dozen Champions just on installation alone. Double-bind those Stets with a copper-bound Toby Steelhead and you've got yourself a window."

A window washer arrived at the door and the installation foreman pointed to one of his men, saying, 'Byron, why don't you take Mr. Clean into the dining room and give him a few pointers on those new Moldonatos?"

The window washer said that he'd been doing his job for thirty-two years and could probably handle it on his own. He wasn't quite ready to start working, so he lit a cigarette and began talking about the recent tragedy involving Eric Clapton's young son, who fell something like fifty floors from his living room window.