Moodswing - Perfectly Fine

Keiger can’t drive with me behind the wheel without losing a few years off his life, he says, and Grant and Lary agree, which really pisses me off. I am a perfectly fine driver. I mean, between the four of us, I am not the one who dropped the dishwasher in the middle of the freeway. I’m not naming names, mind you, or even admitting that anything actually happened, but I will tell you that the guilty party has a smile that belongs on a big voodoo doll and the dishwasher was mine.

Not that I ever saw it. I just got a call one morning from evil voodoo mouth man, who was at that moment perusing a bunch of expensive appliances from the fire sale of a failed dot-com enterprise. “Seriously, it’s never even been used,” he said of the dishwasher. “Not that you’d ever use it, either. I’ve seen your kitchen.” That did it, of course.

“You retard, I would so use it, and not just to store bags of cat litter like you do in yours.” I swear, I do not even know why Lary (oops, I said his name) cares about kitchen appliances. To hear him go on that day, you’d think he cooks a turkey supper every Sunday, when in fact the only thing he has to eat in his house is half a bag of pistachios and half a dozen chocolate Easter eggs. It used to be a full bag and a full dozen, but goddamn, a girl has got to eat when she’s pretending to care for his cat while he’s away, don’t I?

So here Lary was, getting me all excited about a new dishwasher when I already had one that worked perfectly fine. It was scarred and leaked a little bit, but it did its job and I was fine with that. It just wasn’t shiny and plated in nickel or whatever the new one promised. In fact, it was so beat up from the former owner of the house that I figured he must have had parties in which he invited homeless people to come over and hit it with their shopping carts. There were pieces missing from it, too, like the silverware basket, which I’d replaced with a plastic salad strainer, which worked fine. Also, it wasn’t all that quiet when it ran. In fact, the sound was so loud that houseguests had once mistaken it for a helicopter SWAT team. Also, each cycle seemed to take 20 years and all the glasses came out afterward coated in some kind of mystery grit. All the same, though, I would never have thought to replace it if Lary hadn’t called and got me all convinced that a new dishwasher would change my life. “All right,” I told him. “Get it for me and I”ll pay you back.”

Two entire days went by before I called him to politely inquire as to its whereabouts. “Where the hell is my goddamn dishwasher, you booger-eating loser?” I shrieked at him. I’d just spent the last 48 hours entertaining dishwasher fantasies in which I wore pedal-pushers, served appetizers from a tray and accepted everyone’s compliments on how sparkly all my barware was. Plus, I’d just seen a commercial for that same brand dishwasher that demonstrated its abilities, the best being that it could disintegrate an entire three-layer birthday cake with one cycle.”I lost it,” he said, and he sounded serious. I mean, normally he’d have any number of bizarre reasons at the ready for flaking on me. For instance, he once forgot to feed my dog and told me it was because he was forced to copulate with aliens to save the world. It just wasn’t like Lary to not put any effort into lying to me. “Really, where is it?” I asked.

“Really, I lost it,” he kept telling me. “It fell off the back of my truck.”

“No, really.”

“Really.”

“No, seriously.”

“Seriously.”

There was a full 15 minutes of this before I finally believed him, at which point, of course, I had to detonate. “What the hell do you mean it fell off your truck? What kind of extra-chromosome-eating bottom fish loses a dishwasher?” I ranted, the whole while slowly coming to grips with the fact that I was now stuck with my original dented-ass dishwasher that sounds like a leaf blower and doesn’t disintegrate birthday cakes, and somehow that just made my life a lot less enjoyable all of a sudden.

Isn’t that how it always is? You start envisioning something new and different that offers all kinds of added excitement to your life, and then it gets pulled out from under you like a bad parlor trick, and suddenly your otherwise perfectly fine life up to then seems like a total turd pellet. It took me a while, as I put my grit-covered glasses away in the cupboard, to re-appreciate my rusty wreck dishwasher with all its improvised parts.

In the end, I finally surmised, the thing still works perfectly fine. Everything does. Over all, in the grand scheme, pieces will always break and be replaced. None of us ever leave here whole, or not outwardly anyway. Everywhere you look are the patched-up and put-together, not new but not uninteresting nonetheless. The very last thing it does is make life less enjoyable, and I am perfectly fine with that.

hollis.gillespie@creativeloafing.com

Hollis Gillespie is the author of Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch: Tales From a Bad Neighborhood (Harper Collins), which is being released in paperback this month. Her commentaries can be heard on NPR’s “All Things Considered.”