- Did you bring a list of the drugs you are currently taking?
- I’m not taking any drugs, currently.
- You have to have a list of drugs you’re currently taking, or the doctor won’t see you.
- I’m not taking any drugs, currently.
The lady at the desk ignored me and I just figured I’d tell the doctor later that I wasn’t on any meds. She handed me a clipboard laden with paperwork for me to fill out.
- Have you been here before?
- No. This is my first time.
She slapped another pile of paper on top of the clipboard.
- Fill these out and bring them back.
I hopped back to my seat on my left leg, the paper smacking the clipboard. En route, a hippoesque woman with green pants asked me if I wanted a wheelchair.
- That’s okay.
I’d never been offered a wheelchair before and the prospect scared me.
- Are you sure? I think you’re going to need it.
My heart began to beat rapidly. Who was this woman? Was she a nurse? Why would she think I was going to need a wheelchair?
- Are you a nurse?
She laughed.
- Haha, no. I don’t work here.
- Who are you, then?
- I’m Jon’s mother.
Who the hell was Jon?
- Oh, nice to meet you.
I sat down and looked at the pile of paperwork. I began to flip through it. Of the 11 pages, six were about the drugs I was currently taking. I glared at the administrator. She looked up at me and I quickly looked away.
The other five pages asked for my emergency contact information and my and my family’s health history.
When I finished the paperwork, I stood up to hop back to the desk and hand it in. Why did they put the front desk yards away from the seating area? What a poorly designed medical center. That’s what I get for going to the University infirmary.
Jon’s mother came to my aid.
- Are you sure you wouldn’t like a wheelchair?
- No, thank you.
- So stubborn, just like Jon.
At this point, I was fairly certain she didn’t have a son and was just kind of crazy.
- I’ll get it for you. You just sit there and rest that leg of yours.
Although crazy, she seemed very nice. She stood at the desk and waited for the desk lady to come over and take the clipboard from her. When she came back, she bore a half a piece of paper.
- That hair of yours, it’s so curly!
- Thanks.
- Where’d you get that from?
- It came with my body.
- So curly!
- It’s the only part of me that screams Jewish.
- A nice Jewish girl!
She handed over the half sheet of paper.
- Here’s Jon’s cell phone number. I just think the two of you would be perfect for one another.
Apparently she hadn’t made him up. On the paper was his name and phone number in giant letters. Did she think I was legally blind? I put it in my giant purse.
- He’s in the back.
I nodded.
- With the doctor.
I nodded again. Was there anything else back there beside the doctor?
A woman in scrubs stood next to the front desk.
- Tasha!
- Here!
I hopped over to the scrub lady.
- Bye Tasha! Call Jon! He’s free this weekend!
- Bye Jon’s mother.
The woman in scrubs and I sat down on a couple of chairs a few feet from the desk.
- What happened to you?
- I hurt my ankle. I went out a week ago and sprained it, then I thought it was better, so I went out again, was walking down some stairs, and then it just gave out.
- Oooh, ouch.
- Yep.
- Do you smoke?
I laughed.
- Definitely not.
- It’s okay if you do. I do.
I squinted at her. This place was weird.
- I’m a classical vocalist; I would basically lose my future if I smoked.
- I’m a biology/pre-med major; I can smoke as much as I want.
- What year are you?
- A junior.
She was younger than me – my smoking nurse was younger than me. This was a first.
- Where’s the doctor?
- We’ll see her in a minute. First, we’re going to get you some crutches.
She left and came back a minute later with crutches.
- 5’4” 120lbs?
- Hey!
- Here you go. Have you ever used crutches before?
- No.
- Try them out; we’ll go to the x-ray room.
I stood up, dug the tops of the crutches into my ribcage and tried to use them. I saw how they had the potential to be helpful, yet I couldn’t get them to work for me. I put them too far out and swung through the air.
- I’ll carry your purse and jacket.
There was something about the crutches that made me laugh hysterically. I felt like I was traveling with a portable jungle gym. When I “got the hang of them”, I began to swing through the air. Somehow, I thought I could go faster than regular walking on them and soon I was racing down the white-tiled corridor with my head tilted back and laughing so hard my eyes had begun to water and little streams were running down my cheeks.
The junior called after me: Not so fast! / Don’t put them so far out! / Slow down!
But I couldn’t. I was flying down the hallway, the wind sweeping through my hair, my uncontrollable, laughter turning heads. A blur (resulting from either my speed, or perhaps the tears, or a combination of both) of blues, whites and pale faces racing on both sides of me. I continued to laugh until I heard the junior yell:
- Turn left!
I hadn’t thought about turning. I turned with gusto and threw myself at a doorframe. The crutches and I fell to the floor. I felt a little broken, but was relieved that I was in a medical center already. Five people rushed to help me up. Someone yelled,
- She needs a wheelchair!
- No! I can use crutches!
I loved my crutches. And, though I was in pain, I was in a very silly mood, slaphappy.
- Don’t take my crutches!
Once upright and turned the right direction, I began to race down the new hallway in front of me, my adrenaline pumping once again. I laughed so hard I had to tell myself to close my mouth so I wouldn’t bite my tongue. My ears popped.
The junior chased after me, but I was too far ahead for her to catch up.
- Turn right!
I stopped in my tracks and waddled like a penguin to rotate to the right. The junior gripped my arm tightly and led me into a small waiting room with a window into another room. A little woman greeted me from the desk within.
I dropped myself from the crutches down in one of the 4 fuzzy, yellow chairs, across from a fairly attractive brown-haired guy.
The junior handed me my purse and coat. She looked exhausted and I felt a little bad for her.
- Cindy will take care of you.
She nodded toward the window and walked off.
- What happened to you?
- I hurt my ankle. What happened to you?
I was trying to figure out where to put my purse and coat. My crutches were blocking the other seat.
- I dislocated my finger.
He held up his hand. I wanted to scream – his finger disturbed me beyond words, all mangled and looking very unnatural. Instead, I gasped unintentionally, and dramatically held my chest.
- Yeah, I know. Creepy.
- I’m Tasha, but I won’t shake your hand.
- I’m Jon. We’ll shake with our left hands.
We shook with our left hands.
Cindy called my name and asked me to fill out some more paperwork. She put it on the desk. I stood up to hop over to the desk and knocked my crutches over. They hit my purse, which I’d sat on the armrest of the other chair. My purse fell over, spilling not only a couple personal, female items, but also Jon’s phone number.
Jon picked up the clipboard waiting for me and then came over to help with my purse.
- I’ve got it.
I leaned over awkwardly and with outstretched fingers, attempting to rake my stuff in beneath my upside down purse. Of course, the sheet with Jon’s phone number lay on the floor, phone number side up, just beyond my fingers’ reaches.
I looked at him and he squinted down at the paper, as if he needed to squint.
In order to get the paper as quickly as possible, I had to rake it in with my foot. And, in a panic, I forgot I’d sprained my ankle. I stomped on the paper with my right foot and then screamed in pain.
Cindy stood up and surveyed the situation before she calmly sat back down again.
Then, the room was silent. Jon sat in his seat and avoided eye contact. I filled out paperwork about the meds I wasn’t taking.
I was so happy when Cindy called my name. But then I had to go out the door and around a wall to get to where Cindy was. I stood up, put on my coat, put my obscenely large purse around my arm, and swung myself excitedly into the doorframe beside Jon.
- I’m bad at steering.
Jon laughed politely and I left him sitting there, nursing his finger.
Cindy took x-rays of me. I’ll spare you the details of that, as it wasn’t that exciting. But when I finally got in to see the doctor, the real doctor, I realized she was a little crazy too.
- I’m Dr. Plegardi.
- Okay.
- The good news is that your ankle isn’t broken! Isn’t that wonderful?!
I stared at her. I never thought my ankle was broken, so I wasn’t as thrilled as she had wanted me to be. She looked a little disappointed.
- It could have been broken. But it’s not.
I tried to be an enthusiastic patient,
- Hooray!
She liked the hooray and continued with her doctoral-speaking voice. She seemed a little nuts, though. She had a strong Wisconsin accent and when she was thinking, she made growling noises.
I felt like I had stepped into the twilight zone – everyone here was a little off. For a moment, I wondered if I was the weird one. Then, I looked down and saw I was wearing my pumas. No, I was definitely still cool and normal. Many of these people were wearing those ugly sneakers with the giant shoelaces. Vans, I think.
- How are you doing with those crutches?
- I like them. I feel like I’m my own jungle gym.
The junior appeared with another set of crutches. She said,
- These have spikes on the ends of them so you can walk on the ice.
- Oh, thanks.
She left and Dr. Plegardi beamed at the crutches.
- Now you can attack people in alleys!
I laughed nervously.
- Yeah.
She started typing all kinds of information into her computer, asking me questions that I just answered in the paperwork.
- Did you give us a urine sample yet?
- No.
She made another growling noise.
- I really don’t want to do one.
- Oh, okay.
That was easy. The air smelled a little funky in her office and I kept trying to figure out what it was.
She continued typing in information about me and I noticed that her thumb had no nail on it. The skin was creepy: wrinkled and soft looking. The only words that kept entering my mind were, ‘Ew, gross.’ And yet, I couldn’t stop looking at it. I felt more and more nauseous and continued to stare at it queasily. I felt myself grow cold and hot, alternately. I have a really weak stomach for weird things like that.
She ran her hand through her hair and I imagined how scratchy and awful it would feel for her de-clawed thumb to rub against her coarse, peppered hair. I broke out in a cold sweat and began to breathe deeply as chills ran up my spine and goose bumps popped up on my arms.
The smell in the room now stood out more than before and the doctor picked up a Tupperware of coleslaw, white with mayonnaise, the most repulsive food in the world. She held the plastic spork in her right hand so that her de-clawed thumb faced me. I turned to the side, grabbed her trashcan and tossed my cookies. She put down her coleslaw and raised her eyebrows at me.
- Don’t worry, it happens all the time.
My entire body seemed to waver in my seat and my forehead was still wet with cold perspiration.
The junior showed up again and helped me out down the hall to where they fit me with a giant black, cushy boot that they strapped onto my leg with Velcro. Now my foot alone weighed about 20lbs. I saw Jon’s mother again as I was leaving.
- Good for you, you’re doing well on those crutches!
- Thank you. Bye bye.
- Bye! We’ll talk later!
I left the health center and walked into the snow with my spiked crutches. My roommate found me lying in a pile of snow where I’d fallen off the ice and decided to make the best of the situation and make a giant, lopsided snow-angel.

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I had just come from a fancy dinner at L’Atelier with my family for my father’s birthday. I was wearing a maroon, velvet and lace gown. I had no intention of going out afterwards since I’d sprained my ankle pretty severely a few days before; it was difficult to walk. My friend Alex tried her best to persuade me to come out - she refused to go to our friend, Nino’s 21st birthday party without me; he had a $2,000 tab at a local bar opened so that his guests could drink for free, and she was excited to wish him a Happy Birthday. Apparently, she had some ideas on how to get me there in one piece.

At around 10pm, Alex sent me a text message saying that she had a “boot” for me and that now I was definitely coming to the bar. She showed up at my house about half an hour later and tried to stick this “boot” on my foot. I wasn’t clear on what a “boot” was before she brought out one of those giant things from a shopping bag – it looked like a soft, boot-shaped lunchbox and had to be strapped on to my foot with Velcro. We fiddled with the thing, trying to put it on. Not only did the boot not diminish my ankle pain, but it looked as absurd on me as if I had decided to walk around with one foot in a cardboard box. I laughed and told her thanks, but no thanks and ended wore a pair of black flats instead.

As soon as we arrived at the bar, I called our friend Inbar to meet up there. She told us to come to the upstairs part of the bar. It was nearly impossible for me to even walk on my ankle and I told her there was no way I would be climbing any stairs that night.

“Hold on a second,” she told me and then hung up. Some guy appeared a minute later at the base of the stairs. He was only about two inches taller than me, a looming 5′6″ and introduced himself as Rick, my escort for the evening. I told him he could not possibly bear my weight up the stairs. He looked at me like I was crazy and then swooped me up, talking to me the entire way, and much to my relief without strain in his voice. I thanked him, and then he disappeared to initiate a toast to Nino.

Nino came over soon after and upon hearing about my ankle, brought over a chair for me and set it beneath a heat lamp. For some reason, it reminded me of sitting on Miami Beach, beneath an umbrella in a director’s chair, watching everyone else playing in the ocean. Nino thanked me for making it to his birthday, in spite of the sprain. He’s a nice guy.

Alex asked if I could make it over to the bar with her. I abandoned my chair and joined another group of people we knew that had also sidled up to the bar. Alex started a conversation while I ordered drinks. Unfortunately, though, it appeared that the tab was used up. I pulled out my credit card.

“Why are you paying?” Some random guy next to me asked. “Are you here for Nino? You know he has a tab open, right.”
“I heard it’s cashed out.”

I thought the conversation was going to end here, but it wasn’t over and lasted twice as long because he asked my name twice. It went like this:
- What’s your name?
- Tasha. What’s your name?
- Trase.
- Nice to meet you Chance. (It was noisy in there and didn’t hear him correctly)
- You know, I met another Tasha earlier and she was pretty ridiculous. You must be the gorgeous Tasha I was meant to meet.
- (I laughed a little awkwardly)
- What are you drinking?
- Sex on the beach.
- I’ll get it for you.
- You don’t have to. It’s all right.
- No, it’s my pleasure. You know, the real thing is awesome. Sex on the beach, I mean
- Is that right? I heard you end up with sand stuck in orifices you never knew you had…for weeks.
- Haha – no, it’s awesome (He extended his hand) What’s your name?
- Tasha
- Nice to meet you Tasha. I’m Trase.
- Nice to meet you Trase (I got his name the second time around)
- What are you drinking?

We went on like this for a while. Then he told the bartender he was closing his tab. He received a $400 check. He asked me if the guy was a good bartender. I asked him where my drink was. Trase announced that the guy would only get a 10% tip, then he asked me what I was drinking a second time. I told him a Sex on the Beach and he ordered me another before I received the first, then told me he’d be right back.

Alex returned, drank the second Sex on the Beach and said she had to go to the restroom. Rick appeared out of nowhere to carry me down the stairs, though I told him he was no way obligated to. He said he’d like to and so I was carried down the stairs, and then carried back up five minutes later.

Soon, everyone wanted to go to another bar. Rick once again insisted on carrying me back down the stairs, pretending to drop me a couple times to scare me. At some point, some guys on the stairs didn’t step aside for us, and one of them inadvertently stepped on his foot. Rick fell down on a stair and I screamed, whereupon told me that he’d “never let anything happen to me”. I laughed.

Then, once outside, he tried to make me wear some hat his grandmother had knitted for him. If I wasn’t wearing a boot over my sprained ankle, there was no way I was wearing a knitted hat with earflaps over my chignon.

Around this time, Alex, disappeared with my purse and phone.

Rick decided Alex was probably at the next bar and decided to pick me up and run with me down the street. I yelled at him to put me down – but he was drunk and complaining that he’d missed his work out that day and was a physical trainer.

We got to the bar and because I didn’t have my ID, Rick had to go inside to find Alex or someone that knew where she might be. While he was in there, I made friends with a couple guys outside who shook my hand upon introduction.

Then Rick appeared at the door with his earflap hat and told me he found a bouncer he knew who would let me inside. He helped me in and then bought me a 23oz glass of Stella, most of which I left on a bar stool when Alex appeared.

We snuck off to eat peanuts from a barrel – basically the only point of going to that bar was because they gave out free peanuts.

She asked me if I were ready to go and we headed out after waving goodbye to everyone from the peanut barrel.

We went back to her house to talk, and then ate all her peanut butter before she drove me home.

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When I am alone on dark streets at night, I sometimes pull out my phone and have a conversation with myself. While that sounds pretty special all on its own, sometimes I bring it to the next level and “converse” in either Italian or Russian. I’ve taken three years of Russian and a year of Italian. While that doesn’t make me fluent in either of them, I know enough of both languages to throw random real words into a blend of Russian or Italian sounds. When I can’t think of what words to speak next, I “listen to the other speaker.”

It’s easier to converse in Russian. Two units ago, my class learned how to say simple things on the phone: “Hello”, “How are you?”, “Listen to me!”, “Meet me at the Dacha!”, “At 8 o’clock? No I can’t do 8, I am going to the zoo.”

Italian is a bit tougher for me, since I’ve had less time speaking Italian than singing it. I’ve been learning Italian arias and art songs since I was eleven years old and so I typically just speak the lyrics when I’m pretending to speak on the phone in Italian. The conversation will go like so:

Bonjorno. (Pause). Come va? Sto bene, sto bene. Se tu m’ami, se tu so spiri. (Pause). Sol per me, gentil pastor. (Pause). Ho dolor dei tuoi martiri. (Pause)

And it goes on. I find this not only a pretty successful way to ward off crazy people on the street who want my attention, but it’s also pretty entertaining.

And when I’m with a friend and we’re passing crazy people on the street, I sometimes start speaking to my friend in a different language. Typically, they have no idea at first why I’m speaking to them in a different language all of a sudden. But, after the first few times, but they nod and smile at me, waiting for the crazy person to pass so I can be normal again. If the crazy person insists on speaking to us, we look at them confusedly and I tell him that we don’t speak English in either Italian or Russian. They usually understand the word “English” and don’t bother responding.

Apparently though, the crazy people on the North side of town are a little more educated than those downtown, where I live.

I was meeting my friend Carin for coffee down there around 9 o’clock, and we decided to take a walk. We were having a delightful time when some six ft tall man who looked like he had escaped from the Confederate Army with sleeping bags and his entire kit on his back, came limping toward us. He had long, greasy brown hair, a thick beard, and some sort of dirtied uniform on.

We were the only two on the sidewalk besides him. We watched him anxiously, our heartbeats accelerating. As we kept walking toward him, Carin searched frantically for mace in her gigantic pocketbook, and I began to speak at her in Italian.

The man was saying something to himself, without even a prop that would make him seem less crazy. As he came closer, we heard him say quite loudly, “Cackle, cackle, cackle!”

It took a second before my survival mechanism enabled me to call to mind the lyrics of “La Donna é Mobile”: “La donna è mobile,” I said, gesturing excitedly. “ Qual piuma al vento. Muta d’accento — e di pensiero. Sempre un amabile, leggiadro viso, in pianto o in riso, — è menzognero!”

I said all of this as quickly as I could as we passed him, not looking in his direction. He just kept repeating, “cackle cackle cackle” to himself, though he must have been listening to me the whole time. For when we had gotten about ten feet away from him, and thought we were home free, we were stopped dead in our tracks.

La donna è mobile qual piuma al vento
Muta d’accento e di pensier!
e di pensier!
e di pensier!

He sang. His last “pensier” lasted quite awhile, until he ran out of breath. It seemed he had the lungs of a swimmer.

We didn’t turn around and watched him in the reflection of a store window just ahead. He didn’t come closer, but had turned around and was singing to us.

It would be fairytalish to say that he was a great singer and that we had turned around and sang the next verse. But to be quite blunt, he was an awful singer. At least he was loud enough for his voice to echo on the streets.

We watched his reflection in the side window of a store. After his refrain, he began to limp back toward us, perhaps expecting an opera to erupt.

Instead, we ran like hell to my car and played Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on the way back to Carin’s house.

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My left back pocket was empty, so I checked my right back pocket. I would have known if there was anything my front pockets; I always stick my hands in there when I don’t know what to do with them, which is quite often and has already happened at least once today.

I stopped in my tracks, turned around, and headed back the way I came from, crossed a couple streets, opened my front door, opened my bedroom door, set down my backpack, sat on my bed and stared at my feet for a little while.

Soon, I forgot why I was sitting there and staring at my feet instead of sitting happily at my favorite table in the café, sipping tea, nibbling muffin crumbs, and writing.

Random thoughts entered my head and I allowed them to pass through: I recalled times when I was a little girl, testing pens for ink in my father’s office. I wondered how fax machines worked. I decided Jenny in 7th grade didn’t have anything against me, but was really too into herself to even notice me.

Then I stood up and looked around, wondering who came up with the concept of time and how much of it I had just wasted. Typically, I stuck pretty close to a routine. Without one, I became pathetically lazy. The café and my writing were essential parts of it. But to go to the café, I needed money.

Where did my money go? Why were everyone’s birthdays in October? Why did my hair-stylist accuse me of bringing my hair to a slow death by using cheap hair products? Why did I not realize that to pledge the minimum of $100 in the Cancer Dance Marathon meant that I had to pay whatever money I didn’t raise (why didn’t I realize I had to raise money for it, either?)?

So, my pockets were empty. I paced, visions of black coffee and bran muffins taunting me. I would have to alter my routine again and get a job. Where? How much did I want an hour? As much as I could make! But what was reasonable?

I ran around Pearl Street Mall picking up job applications. Several places told me that I needed to drop off resumes.

A resume. I didn’t have one of those.

“It’s easy,” my friend Laurina in the Business school told me. “I’ll send you mine and you can just change the details.”

Her resume was immmaculate. I thought of things I could possibly hire her for, but nothing came to mind. Every job she had, she had a description below it about what she learned from her position, what her duties were, and what she enjoyed most about the job. Beneath the jobs were two lists of references, 3 professional, 3 personal.

I changed all the information, but halted at the “Personal References” section. Who could I call to hand that I’d known for at least a year that would give me a good recommendation? My coworkers were listed for two spots already. For the third, I scrolled through my phone and hesitantly put down Jon Myers. I still had his number from the last time I house-sat for him and his wife, June.

Jonathon Myers was a friend of my family’s. He was a great guy, though I didn’t think he knew me that well. He knew I was a good kid, and I figured that that had to be enough for a recommendation. Besides, if he gave me a bad one, my parents would inevitably find out and stop going to dinner with him and June at the Organic Ali’s.

I printed out 30 copies of my resume, kissed the top of the pile for good luck, and tucked them into a chartreuse, two-pocket folder, ready for distribution. Yes, I know to have printed out 30 copies seems a little overzealous, but my father always taught me that the more I distribute, the better the odds of my success.

Somehow, I managed to drop off all the copies to places that were hiring. Now, all I could do was sit back and wait for the phone calls. I put my phone on vibrate in class so I’d know when I’d been rung. break

My phone never rang. The only person who seemed to get any calls was Jono from my critical thinking class. We were group members and outside of class, he’d told me that he was keeping his phone on because his sister was expected to go into labor any moment.

Every time his phone would ring, he’d jump in his seat and check the caller ID, furrowing his eyebrows in confusion before hitting the “ignore” button and apologizing to our professor.

Nearly every class period, Jono’s phone would ring. About a week after his nearly-incessant phone calls, not only did he stop jumping every time the phone rang, but he’d also shoot me what I call the “look of death” from across the room. Having no idea what was going on, I became increasingly embarrassed as people started following his glares to my desk. I raised my hands innocently to show that I wasn’t the one calling him.

Not being one for confrontation, I avoided Jono as much as I could and communicated with my group through email only. It was about two weeks after the calls and glares that I figured out what was going on.

I’d shown up to class early one day and had to wait in the hall until the previous class left our room. I heard Jono on the phone, coming up the stairs. There was a ladies’ bathroom two doors away from our classroom; I ran to take refuge within it. It was a particularly quiet building; not many classes were held within it, and the halls echoed. From within the bathroom, I could still make out Jano’s end of the conversation.

JANO: Three years. (Pause) Yep. Uh-huh. Right. Yeah, she’s great. I know her really well. (Pause) Well, I mean, she’s a very talented girl – she kind of has a reputation for excellence around here. (Pause) campus. (Pause) yeah. She’s established quite a clientele among me and my friends. I’ve never known someone so impressive in the (chuckle) boudoir. (Pause) What job is this in reference to again? Why would she need to work at Film-base? She makes plenty of money off of us. (Pause) Right. Okay, well I hope I was of help. (Pause) sure. If you see her, tell her I miss her. She’s really hot and it’s been a few days. (Pause) Okay, thanks. Bye-Bye.

My mouth hung open. I pulled out my phone from my bag and scrolled through the J’s:

JACKIE
JAMES
JENNIE
JENNIFER
JOHN
JON
JON A.
JON M.

John/Jon was a popular name. I hadn’t scrolled down far enough to see “JON M.” Jon Myers. My parents’ friend. JON was Jono – when I first met him, I didn’t know Jono was his nickname. I’d already had two Jons with distinguishing last initials, so I had put him down as just plain “Jon”.

My heart dropped into my shoes and I walked on the precarious edge between keeping my cool and crying uncontrollably. Instead, I chose an alternate route, growing flushed and breaking out in a cold sweat. (Why would my sweat be cold if I felt really hot? The body is so weird.) I looked at myself in the mirror. I had to do something; I was developing sweat stains.

I left the bathroom; it was time for class. I skulked into the class and sat in the corner opposite Jono. I looked at him, my face felt like it was melting off my bone structure. Perhaps my roommate could help me tape it into place later – she was good with crafts.

Class began. Consistent with the previous two weeks, Jono’s phone rang – you’d think he would have changed his default ringtone from “Soulja Boy” to something more classroom-appropriate by now.

He stood up.

“Is it time?” our professor asked.

“No. Sorry. I’ll be right back.” The professor shrugged, worn down by days of in-class phone calls.

I had to do something. With all the adrenaline I could tap into, I leapt up from my seat without excuse and ran out the door in time to hear Jono say:
“She has a reputation for excellence.”

I did the first thing I could think of. When I was 7 years old I used to tackle my father and brother, Kato-like. Needless to say, that’s what I thought of.

I knocked Jono to the concrete floor and took advantage of his shock to grab his cell phone. But Jono had taken Judo and was used to falling over. He grabbed his cell phone back and tried to pin me to the floor. But I’d taken Brazilian Jiu-jitsu for a week and a half, and got him in an arm bar. Jono got out of the arm bar (because I suck at them) and somehow pinned me to the floor again. Seconds afterwards, my legs, which were kicking furiously, trying to be of help, kicked/pushed his chest, giving me distance to move away. I slid the cell phone about five feet away from us, along the glossy, concrete floor and crawled toward it like an escaped toddler. Jono grabbed my foot and pulled me back toward him. I clapped the floor with my hands for traction. They made a squeaking noise. I turned around and kicked wildly at him. He dodged my kicks, but they seemed to disorient him, so I kept kicking.

The door to the classroom opened, and the two of us looked over at our professor and the class watching us. I hadn’t stopped kicking – my legs were now on autopilot. Jono hadn’t moved from where he was kneeling, either, his face two inches from my extended kicks.

My legs lost momentum and it donned on me that the two of us could be kicked out of school for fighting. I wanted to tell this to Jono before we both were expelled.

Our professor ordered everyone but us back in the room. As she did so, Jono whispered to me, “We’re friends, or we get kicked out.”

“I’m not an idiot.” I told him.

We began to laugh before the professor turned around.

“I hate you,” He told me between chuckles, running to grab his cell phone.

“Really? ‘Cause I thought you couldn’t get enough of me,” I told him dryly. Was that a better retort than either “Oh yeah, well I love you,” or “Damn, there goes my clientele”? I wish I had said the ‘clientele line’. That would have been better.

I started to laugh. He came over again and put his arm around me, like he owned me. My laughs turned a little resentful and I realized I had lapsed into a cackle. I reverted back to a short-lived chuckle that ended when the professor walked over to us.

“Stop laughing. I’m not an idiot,” As soon as she said that, I knew I wouldn’t be able to pay attention to anything else she had to say; I’d still be thinking about how I had just said “I’m not an idiot” to Jono.

What I got from the rest of our professor’s tirade, was that if she saw “anything else so much as resembling hostility from one of us toward the other” she’d report us immediately to the Dean of Student Affairs. She told us she didn’t want to see us for the rest of the day and dismissed us. We both tiptoed into the classroom to grab our stuff before leaving.

“I only realized what was happening just today, you know.” I told him as we walked along the road, on the way to our prospective houses. I explained to him the mix up of names, using my phone as my prop. I explained I didn’t realize why he was getting all the calls and then glaring at me in class. He told me I should have explained this all to him sooner. I told him he should have realized it was a mistake. We laughed a little bit about our hall wrestling and just before we parted ways, it dawned on me that I was insanely attracted to him.

We said goodbye and I smiled to myself as I walked down the street.

“Tasha!” he called out to me.
‘Yes, lover!’ I thought to myself, turning around.

“You should check out your hair when you get home. It’s classic!”

I ran home. It’s fun running through crowds, but you can’t do it unless you have a purpose – mine was that I had to check my hair ASAP.

Five minutes later, I was staring at myself in the bathroom mirror. I had put my hair up that morning. While my hair was still in a clip, two giant strands had come out and split on top of my head into two frizzy antennas, stretching toward opposite poles.

It was the weekend and our group met once more to go over Monday’s presentation. Jono didn’t receive any calls during our meeting, presumably because the hiring managers were in primarily on the weekdays.

“The Eiffel Tower is really awesome,” Jono said as Roselyn held up a poster-sized picture of it. “It’s got this-“ he was interrupted by his phone. He stopped talking and pulled his cell phone from his back pocket and glanced at me – he looked like an overheated dog. His phone continued to sing:

“Soulja Boy Off In This Hoe
Watch Me Lean And Watch Me Rock
Super Man Dat Hoe
Then Watch Me Crank Dat Robocop
Super Fresh, Now Watch Me Jock
Jocking On Them Haterz Man
When I Do Dat Soulja Boy
I Lean To The Left And Crank Dat thing
(Now Yua!)”

He checked his phone and all his energy was restored when he answered. “Okay! Okay Sheila! I’m coming! I’ll be there!”

‘She’s having a baby!’ he told the class. ‘She’s having a baby now!’ he told me.

I fed off his excitement, “Oh my God!” I told him and started jumping up and down. I got a brief kick out of jumping so that my head was higher than the Eiffel Tower.

He joined in the jumping for a second. “I gotta go!” he said.

“I’ll drive you!”

“I have a car!” He told me.

“Okay! Bye!”

“Bye!”

He ran off with his backpack and I found myself standing in front of my class. They looked as bored as they did when we were giving our presentation.

“You guys can sit down now,” our Professor told me. “He’ll be back on Wednesday, so you can finish your presentation then.”

I sat down, my heart rate slowing down, smiling in spite of the classroom’s dead energy, wondering if Jono would actually be back on Wednesday. I hoped so.

“Is the next group ready? You guys will have to go today instead.”

“Damn it,” a few people in the back of the room chorused.

(In case you were wondering, my job search was unsuccessful. The odds of employers wanting to hire a reformed prostitute were lower than you would think.)

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I love contacts, and then I hate them. I love them because I don’t have to wear glasses, and I hate them because they are far from being perfected. Every morning when I tried to put them in, I would be anxious the rest of the day that they’d slide around and cause me discomfort. Sometimes they would, sometimes they wouldn’t.

Then, I’d forget to take them out at the end of long nights, and I’d wake up with a headache so bad, I Had to walk around with a blanket over my head to keep the light out.

Two summers ago, my optometrist told me there was a kind of contact that you can sleep in, for over a month. I gave it a test run and was delighted to find that overnight, the contact would somehow become glued to my eyeball and eliminate any kind of movement that caused discomfort. These contacts were seemingly magical.

Then, a few months ago, whatever substance made the contact stick to my eyeball, overproduced and my contacts began to blur. Whenever my eyes watered, they cleared for a few minutes and my vision was restored. Luckily but oddly, only one eye would blur at a time, and my eyes took turns, as if they were a tag-team.

Because I was too lazy to get myself into see my optometrist, I walked around partially blind, trying to yawn all the time, or would “inadvertently” poke myself in the eye. The humidity helped to some extent, so I welcomed all kinds of rainstorms and fog.

Finally, three months later, I went in and explained my situation. My optometrist flipped up my eyelids for the first time while I sat writhing in her chair with irritation.

Later that day, back on campus, I could see, but my left contact was bothering my left eye so much that every ten minutes I had to make a routine trip to the library restroom to take it out and pop it back on my eye. During one of these trips, I walked into the restroom and heard someone using the facilities. Then I heard her speaking on the phone. Ew! I thought. That’s just wrong. Does the person on the other end of the phone know she’s peeing and talking to her at the same time? Can the person hear what’s going on on my end? I shuddered and then took out my contact and held it up to the light. It appeared to be misshapen.

The bathroom talker emerged from her stall and stared at me analyzing my contact by the light. I prayed she would just wash her hands and leave. Mostly I prayed that she would just wash her hands, so I could feel somehow cleaner.

“Your contact giving you trouble?”

“Yep. I think it’s just misshapen.”

“Some people think it’s gross, but when mine is bothering me, I stick it in my mouth to make it wet again.”

I stopped looking at my contact and turned to look at her. There was no sign of her kidding.

How strange. Appearances can be so deceiving; she looked fairly normal.
For lack of anything better to say, I turned back to my contact and said the first thing I could think of, “I wonder how it would taste.”

I waited for her to wash her hands and leave. My contact had been bothering me all day and nothing was helping.

I looked at my contact. It looked at me. I put it in my mouth.

I tried not to think about the prospect of my eye juice being on it, and instead told myself I was eating some exotic and slippery sea-creature. I shuddered, took the specimen out quickly, and stuck it in my eye.

It seemed to help a little bit.

I sent my friend a text message: someone told me to put my contact in my mouth because it was bothering me.

She replied: Ew! That’s insane!

I was glad I’d sent that message. I’d felt as though I’d never done it.

One hour later, my eye began to throb. I ran back to the bathroom again, and after checking to make sure all the stalls were empty, I performed the trick a second time.

I swallowed it. I tried to cough it up, but obviously failed. All the things I’d ever swallowed came flooding back to me: rings, paperclips, gum, pennies, and meatloaf. Most of these were as a child, though.

I walked around, nearly blind in my left eye. Upon exiting the bathroom, I ran into the doorframe. That was my last contact.

I made an appointment with my optometrist again. Somehow I drove myself to her office without running into or over anyone.

Grabbing for the door handle, I found it about two inches to the right of where I’d been groping for it. I opened the left door and ran into the doorframe of the door that had a sign saying “Please Use Other Door”.

“Hi there! You must be Tasha,” the receptionist greeted me. I’d never seen her before.

“Wow, good guess,” I told her.

“Not really.” She pointed at my parking job. I closed my left eye and saw that I parked in the middle of two spaces.

My optometrist took me into the back room and asked what happened to the contact I’d swallowed.

“I threw it away,” I told her.

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You’re supposed to kiss the buffalo head in The Pub when you turn 21. That buffalo head seems like it’s been in The Pub since the 60s, so God knows how many people have kissed it. At least the large majority of them were, in fact, 21year old college students. So there’s probably a smaller chance that it carries catching, kissing diseases.

I didn’t care.

From a very early age, I’ve hardly ever even shared a drink with my own brother (and in moments of exception, I at least wiped the lip of the cup off between turns).

I have an intense disgust for other people’s saliva.

So, of course, it didn’t help when Jeremy yelled out to the crowded pub, “Look! I’ll do it first!” and then stood up on a stool to reach the buffalo head, mounted high on the wall.

The floor was so crowded; it was impossible to move without elbowing your way through the swallowing crowd. I struggled to see him above the crowd line, but my view was obstructed by so many flailing limbs – it was odd to realize how often people typically do flail their limbs, and I’d venture to say that one would never really notice unless they tried to see just a little above the heads of a crowd. Elbows and hands and arms were everywhere, swaying arrhythmically, without music.

“Jesus, he just frenched it!” Someone yelled out.

“It’s not even his birthday!” Someone else called out from the back.

Jeremy strolled over to me: “I just made out with that buffalo. If I can do it, you can do it.”  I grimaced inadvertently, wondering whether his saliva had dried yet.

“No.” I firmly told my group of 25 who had come out with me to celebrate.

“Why, Tasha? Go do it!” My brother urged me. Easy for him to say – he turned 21 in New York where there were no buffalos around to kiss.

I hadn’t had more than a couple drinks when, in that packed environment, with ten different people talking to me simultaneously, I was becoming increasingly disoriented. I blinked furiously, hoping it would help something make sense.

I tried to squeeze my way to the door, but a wall of friends stood like guards, barring me from the exit. Like a whale, heaved by the ocean waves onto the formidable shore, the crowd heaved me toward the stool.

“Kiss the buffalo! Kiss the buffalo!” they chorused.

“No, that’s okay,” I told them meekly. “I don’t have to kiss the buffalo.”

“Kiss the buffalo!”

“It’s dirty!”

The crowd laughed. Even people at the back of the crowd laughed, though they couldn’t possibly have heard my reply.

“Ummm….”I stared up at the buffalo looming over me with an angry eye. “It’s luminous,” I told my Russian tutor.

“Luminous? How is it luminous?”

“Wrong word.” I thought for a moment: “It looms!”

“Why don’t you want to kiss the buffalo?” Someone else asked.

“I don’t need to. I already know it’s my birthday.”

“Tasha,” my roommate got my attention. She was always protective of me. “Do you really not want to kiss the buffalo?”

I shook my head ‘no’ like a sobbing five year old.

“Then you don’t have to kiss the buffalo.”

I felt like hugging her, but instead, I decided to hide behind her. This proved to be a difficult task, since she’s 5’2” and I’m 5’4”. Russell, who was 6’4” spotted me, and dragged me out from behind my surrogate pillar and left me beside the stool.

Masses of hands reached out to support my trembling legs as they themselves climbed the stool to the waiting buffalo head.

The noise died away and it was just the buffalo and I, having a moment. I looked at it and it looked at me. It wanted me to kiss it. It didn’t care how many people had kissed it before. I was the only one it cared about now, and this was our time together. I closed my eyes and pecked it on the nose.

“Hooray!” The crowd yelled.

“What was that all about?!” Jeremy shouted out. “I hooked up with that buffalo!”

I’ve never climbed off a stool before without sitting down first after a long list of awkward maneuvers. Nevertheless, this is how I attempted to come off the stool. This failed right away, and instead I fell off, backwards, and crowd-surfed to the exit.

Everyone gave me hugs and high fives, as though I had saved the pub from being blown up, instead of kissing an artificial buffalo head that was mounted on a wall. It was silly. But in spite of myself, I was proud.

I had kissed the buffalo. I was 21.

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A little girl in pigtails came up to me last week while I was sitting in the café. I looked at her and smiled. She smiled back, and then, with nothing else to do, I returned to my writing while she was standing right next to me, staring at me.

“Excuse me.”

“Yes, little girl?”

“Are you a Christian?”

Oh Jesus, I thought. I was never that great with little kids and now I really had to come up with something good, something tactful, something to keep myself calm while, at the same time, not making her run off screaming devil and crying hysterically.

“Why?” That was the best I could do? Okay. Okay, I asked why, that’s okay.

“Because, if, if you’re not, you’ll go to hell. I don’t want you to go to hell.”

“I don’t believe in hell.”

Her mouth dropped open and I looked around to see who my audience was. I had two gray-haired women staring at me, one through her spectacles, the other one from over her spectacles’ rims.

“But there is a hell.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Why not, it’s in the bible.”

Here it goes. Now I have to look like a jerk and be a pain in the ass with a little girl in pigtails. “I don’t read the bible.”

“You should. You’ll go to hell if you don’t.”

“You forget, I don’t believe in hell.”

“Just because you don’t believe in it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.”

“Do you believe in Lala land?” I asked her.

“What’s Lala Land?”

“A lot of people already live there and they don’t believe it.”

“Is it in the bible?”

“I don’t know, I don’t read the bible.”

“Do you go to church?”

“Not your church.”

“But you go to a church?”

“Listen little girl…you’re really cute and all, but I don’t believe in Jesus.”

I was getting tired of her mouth dropping open. I was working on a great idea for a story. All I had so far was: “Though he was blindfolded and sitting in the middle of a park, thousands of miles (he thought) away from everyone, he could smell her fragrance in the air.”

“Jesus loves you. How could you not believe in him.” I looked around for help. I saw a Hassid in the corner and tried to pawn her off on him, “look, over there. He doesn’t look like he loves Jesus, either. Why are you picking on me?”

“I’m saving you.”

“I don’t have time to be saved today. Maybe next Friday.”

She ignored me. “Jesus loves you.” She stared at me a second before she said, “I just want to give you this.” She handed me a pamphlet of with a giant church on it. It kind of looked like Epcot with a giant cross on top.

“That’s alright. I’ve got one already.”

“No you didn’t. I never gave you one.”

“Can we just say you did so that we can save a tree? I’d hate to waste a tree on Jesus.”

“Jesus made the trees.”

“What?”
“Jesus made the trees.”

I took out the Environment Colorado flyer someone had handed me earlier and gave it to her, “then save them, by God, they’re precious.” I handed it to her – there was a big, glossy tree on the front.

“Just…take it.” She put the pamphlet on my table and pushed my head back, saying “Go with Jesus,” before walking off with the Environment Colorado flyer.

On my way out, I dropped the pamphlet in the recycling bin and saved a tree in the name of Jesus.

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Here’s how my school gym works: You enter and they scan your Student ID, you walk downstairs to an area where you can check out one of those key-locks and a towel. Then you proceed to the locker room. You stuff your stuff in one of those long lockers, slap the lock on it, take your key, your ipod, and your water upstairs to the cardio room. When you’re done with the elliptical machine, you hop on the treadmill and run for a half hour. Afterwards, you get this little feeling of superiority inspired by the fact that you still feel like you’re walking on a giant conveyor belt. You glide into the weight room, lift ten pound weights and feel like you could be that bandana-woman on the tampax posters until you become intimidated by giant frat guys and football players lifting twice your own weight. You stretch like you only meant to be in there for two minutes and walk quickly back to the locker room, realizing that you just sweat so much in the cardio room that you must look like you just escaped a lochness abduction. You take that very important locker key, open your locker, strip, grab your towel, conditioner, and soap, lock your locker, and hit the showers.

Now if you’re me last Wednesday, you’ve gotten this far but made one fatal mistake: you forgot to remove the key from your lock before you walked to the showers. I hadn’t realized this until I had taken a nice, steamy shower and humiliated myself in front of the other showering gym-goers (I thought no one was around when I attempted to shave my legs, lifting them one-by-one at nearly 90 degrees to my body and bracing them against the shower wall, giving them a graphic anatomy lesson).

These three, perfect-bodied blondies stopped to stare at me for about five seconds with their mouths agape, an eternity when they exchanged looks directly afterwards. I lowered my leg from where it was on the shower-cubicle wall, stopped admiring my flexibility. I snapped my towel off its hook and turned off the shower as they drifted away in a daze.

I really, really wanted to get dressed. I rushed to my locker without the aforementioned key, ran back to my shower, thinking I’d left it behind, and then began to panic. I pulled on the lock, hoping I’d get lucky and it would pop open.

My first class was in half an hour.

God forbid I should ever be stranded on a desert island – I consider the contents of my gym bag as necessary to my survival as food. In ten minutes, my curly hair, without maintenance, would look like a byproduct of electric shock therapy.

In a panicked frenzy, I paced back and forth for about 20 seconds, breathing heavily. I pathetically tugged on the lock as my bottom lip began to protrude, preparing to quiver. I sat down on the concrete bench and held my face in my hands until I heard a trio of voices advancing. The same three girls were heading toward me, talking about their opposition to tights, as they really all focused on me, avoiding even looking at me. They were still about 20 feet away when I abandoned my conditioner and soap, fled the bench and ran into the sauna to hide.

I sat down on one of the wooden shelves – the heat felt good, but I once again thought of my hair and the tragedy it would become when it dried without anti-frizz serum. I wondered how long it would be until I could come out and they would be gone. Some other girl came in, spread out her towel and lay naked on top of it on the wooden shelf across from me. To avoid seeming like I was watching her, I mirrored her and lay naked on top my own towel.

I didn’t realize I was falling asleep until I woke up drenched in sweat, feeling as though my head were too big for my body. I stumbled out of the sauna and nearly passed out.

What time was it? I ran out into the locker area and found a mounted clock– somehow 45 minutes had passed. No key. My second class started in twenty minutes. I don’t know if it was an effect of the sauna, my panic, or both, but I became conscious of my racing heartbeat.

I sat down in front of my locker and began to cry. A Mexican woman had begun to mop the floor at the end of the row of lockers, but stopped when she saw me walking toward her, dabbing tears from my eyes with the corner of my towel.

“I lost the key to my locker. I’m going to be naked forever,” I told her.

“¿Che?”

Why the hell was I taking Russian?

I grabbed her hand to lead her to my locker and show her the situation – thinking maybe she had a skull key or something.

We made it halfway to my locker before my towel fell off. She stared at me. I stared down at myself and nodded slowly. Why wasn’t I better endowed? Where did I get my breasts from? My father?

Unexpectedly, Maria (so said her nametag) began to laugh her head off as I recovered slightly and suppressed the urge to squeeze her gratefully.

When we reached my locker and I turned the invisible key in the lock and then shrugged my shoulders and lifted my hands palms up in an “I don’t know” gesture, she nodded and held up her pointer finger to mean “one minute”.

Maria disappeared for half-an-hour during which I studied myself in the hall mirror and tried to wipe off the excess make up beneath my eyes with my towel, making the skin red and swollen. My hair had begun to sprout little baby hairs.

Maria returned with a key and I jumped up and down in excitement. She joined me and we jumped together. Then she opened the lock and opened the locker triumphantly.

My first thought: These aren’t my clothes.

Fuck.

All these lockers look alike. Next one over. It was the next one over. It had to be. I tap it hurriedly. Maria put her head in her hands before she left to get the next lock.

When she returned, an authoritative-looking woman accompanied her. Her bright, red lipstick scared me. She was probably there to make sure I wasn’t stealing anything.

I explained the situation to her and promised her I had my Student ID in the locker so that I could prove I wasn’t stealing anything. She opened up the locker and to my relief, my gym bag was hanging peacefully on the hook within it.

Maria clasped her hands together happily and I gave her a giant hug. She returned to her mop bucket and I scrambled to make my 1 o’clock class, arriving just in time to catch the beginning of the Parliament of Foules discussion.

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I’m afraid to die.

I’m afraid of how I’ll die.

Once I took this sociology class in high school and we spent a few weeks learning about execution. Looking back, I’m not sure why we spent so much time discussing it, but we learned about various forms of torture and capital punishment that were now outdated (in most states and countries), such as the guillotine, or the electric chair.

The class must have affected me deeply because my father nicknamed dinnertime, “Tasha’s Death Hour.” I would play my own version of the “Which Would You Rather?” game: “I think I’d rather be drowned than hung,” I’d say as my mother would set down her salad fork with a pungent look of disgust. “When you’re drowned, you supposedly experience intense burning like you’re head’s going to explode. But, personally, I’d prefer that to having my sphincter give out.”

It took a couple of semesters’ break from sociology for me to formulate new concepts about death. In fact, I tried to avoid thinking about it at all, because when I did, my family would find me in my room, staring wide-eyed at the wall for hours wondering how any of us make it to the end without something horrific happening to us.

I was successful concentrating on life until Halloween came around. For the first time, I began to see the value of the cable hook up in my room and watch the Travel Channel. Hour-after-hour, I’d learn about haunted towns in the US and Europe and stories of their hauntings. It never occurred to me to think about what happens after death; I was only fascinated with the tales of deceit that lead to death and tormented souls (none of the spirits who stick around seem to have died of natural causes).

It took me a few weeks to recover after Halloween. I think I began to focus on life more when the Travel Channel switched from stories of hauntings to stories about the best restaurants in the Bahamas. Until then, even a swaying drapery would leave me in an irreconcilable state of dread that could only be assuaged by playing loud music and repeating to myself “This is stupid” about fifty times (really quickly and in a fetal position).

And it wasn’t until last night when I watched Godard’s Pierrot Le Fou that I began to think of death again. Several scenes scared the hell out of me; people were being murdered left and right – being shot to death, having scissors stuffed into their necks…Jean Paul Belmondo’s character was nearly drowned by having his head and face wrapped in his lover’s pretty, red dress and a portable shower head hosing down his nasal cavities.

After about two hours of these scenes, I began to think a little more philosophically than when I was in 10th grade and went to sleep after praying: God, please let me age fast so I can die happily in my sleep.

It seems that when people make it to the end without experiencing one of the many paths to death presented in Pierrot Le Fou, they’ve won some kind of a race; They’ve been luckier than most to make it from start to finish without falling into a sewer.

I’ve been thinking though, isn’t that just what life is? We are born (and unfortunately, bthat’s not a choice we have any control over) and then we die. The whole point of doing anything in life is just to make our journey more interesting and pass the time. Call me a pessimist, but it’s true. Nothing really matters except birth and death.

No way I’m having kids. I don’t want to put someone else through this ridiculous cycle. Okay, so you have a “great” life, you “accomplish” things. All that means is you’ve distracted other people really well in your lifetime, made their time of existence a little more bearable. Good for you, you’ve done a mitzvot. I say, if you don’t kill anyone and let other people get through the race peacefully, you’re a good person.

Odd that what’s managing to distract me from this crazy life cycle is watching films on death.

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Every Wednesday morning, there’s a kid on the bus (he looks to be about twelve and I don’t know what he’s doing riding the bus alone). He asks me the most ridiculous questions. For some reason, he’s always there, always sitting beside me. I don’t know how it happens. I sit down and he’s there – I don’t look for him, he doesn’t know where there’s going to be a free seat when he climbs aboard.

About a week ago, I was standing in the aisle, as there were no seats available. As students boarded the bus, I found myself being gradually pushed to the back of the bus. I looked to my right, and there the kid was, sitting there, his short legs dangling six inches from the rubber ridged floor, smiling up at me.

“Hi.” He usually instigated our exchanges.

“Hello.”

“Do you think there was ever a time when um…” he paused, perhaps for effect, but probably not. “…Peru only had 25 people living in it?”

“Maybe.” I was impressed he was aware there was a country called Peru. He probably just saw it on a map somewhere.

“Because I think it did.”

“Then you’re probably right. It probably did have 25 people at one point.”

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