Life on the Naughty List, or What the Elf!

11. Chapter 11

Chapter 11

B efore heading to bed, I put fresh food and water out for Bootsy so he wouldn’t get me up in the morning. I learned a long time ago that an empty Bootsy dish meant an annoyed Bootsy who would do everything in his power to annoy me until I finally broke down and fed him.

The sun woke me the following morning around 10:00 a.m. I was not in the mood to be awake yet, so I rolled over and pulled the covers over my head, blocking out the light. I finally rolled out of bed an hour later and made coffee. I put on my slippers and looked out on my tiny balcony to find that a light layer of early morning snow hung around in the shaded areas.

“Hmm… I didn’t know we were expecting snow overnight,” I said. “Bootsy?” I called.

I heard a meow from my couch. I looked over and found a white furball nestled in a blanket. Technically, the blanket was a throw blanket, but Bootsy preferred it for his personal nesting place at night. At first, I tried chastising him every time he yanked it from the back of the couch, but I quickly realized that the battle was long over, and I wouldn’t be winning it any time soon.

I walked over and rummaged through my cabinet, deciding what brand of coffee I wanted. Did I want something flavored, or did I want something bold? Being forced to make any kinds of decisions before noon and without caffeine should simply be illegal. I pulled the regular, bold coffee and put it in my coffee pot. When I went in for my annual physical this year, my doctor asked me how many cups of coffee I drink a day. Without thinking, I had responded, “Does a pot count as one or two cups?”

Once I poured the first cup, I went over to the couch and unplugged my iPhone from where I’d left it in its charging cradle. I flipped through emails. I had some new pages to learn for the show. Nothing too radical, but I figured I’d wait to run lines that evening. I then checked out my social media, email messages and texts.

Johnny : Again, So, so, so sorry Seegers was married. Again, didn’t know.

I shot Johnny back a quick text, reassuring him that it wasn’t his fault. I knew Johnny well enough to know that he would sit and stir until I reassured him that I didn’t blame him for Ralph’s infidelity.

Ralph : Had a good time last night. Hope to see you again soon. Want to take you up on that offer for coffee. - R

“Are you kidding me?” I mumbled at my phone. Blocked!

Bootsy looked over at me as if asking the human to “simmer down now. One of us is sleeping.” And yes, I totally know that I anthropomorphize my cat. In my mind, he’s a little furry human who happens to be mute. Some of my best conversations happen with Bootsy.

After I’d finished coffee number one of the morning, I searched my fridge for food. I opened the fridge door. I had condiments, milk, and wine…the breakfast of champion cat ladies everywhere. There was a box of pizza pockets in the freezer that had been there since the world began. I dusted the freezer burn off the box, opened it, and popped one into the microwave.

While the frozen pizza pocket was cooking, I poured myself coffee number two of the morning. I figured that I’d be ready to shower by the time I got to coffee number four. By coffee number six, I’d be ready to leave the apartment and do laundry.

Ding! The bell on the microwave dinged. I reached in and touched the pizza pocket, and immediately regretted that decision. I ripped my finger back out of the microwave. I didn’t think I’d kept my hand on it long enough to burn myself badly, but I ran my hand under cold water, just in case. After drying my hands on a dishtowel, I ripped off a paper towel, folded it in half and grabbed my pizza pocket. I was at least smart enough to know that sticking my tongue in the pizza pocket was not a smart move. I blew on its edge and took a small bite to taste it. It had a kind of pepperoni pizza gooey center. Part of me almost felt bad that I was eating the pizza pocket when I had access to New York-style pizza within feet of the building’s entrance, but that would require me to actually leave the comfort of my home. Instead, I ate the perversion of authentic pizza. It was, surprisingly, not bad tasting. Sure, it didn’t have the extra layer of grease coating the top of the pizza like I get out on the street, but it was edible.

After I’d finished my brunch, I had cup of coffee number four and decided it was time to shower, so I crawled back into bed and took a short nap instead. I wasn’t feeling in the most productive mood.

I hauled myself out of bed an hour later. I might as well have been a petulant child having a fit on the ground, pounding my fists and feet, yelling, “I don’t wanna go to school!”

With complete reluctance, I dragged myself back into the kitchen and drank two more cups of now-lukewarm coffee. Hey, beggars can’t be choosers. And at that moment, I wasn’t in the mood to heat the coffee in the microwave or make a new pot. Of course, Bootsy eyed me from his perch on the couch. He was clearly still annoyed that I was making so much noise.

With more coffee in my system, I was ready to face the world. Well, face the laundry facilities in the building. I ran through the shower quickly, and threw on some leggings and an oversized sweatshirt I’d kept from a boyfriend years ago. What can I say? I loved the sweatshirt more than I loved him. I gathered up the laundry I had to do—along with my iPad—and headed down to the basement.

Laundry on a Sunday is always a busy place. Plus, it is the best place to find out about building gossip. Want to find out who’s having an affair with whom? Do laundry on Sunday. Want to find out which tenant got a gig on a new show? Do laundry on a Sunday. Want to know who is leaving the building because now they’re fancy after having landed a role in a major TV series or movie? Yep, do laundry on a Sunday. I walked in and was glad to find the room only half full. Even better, not all the machines were full, so I quickly took over two machines and separated my darks from my lights. I put in some detergent along with my quarters and waited for the laundry to finish its final spin cycle.

While I waited for my laundry to finish, I read my iPad. I checked out The Times to see if there were any stories I should hear about. Nothing really popped, so I checked out The Post to see if they had any salacious gossip I needed to know about, still nothing that urgent. I finally opened the new pages I’d been emailed from Aarya and set about reading. Most of the changes were minor and didn’t impact my part of the show, which made me happy. I really didn’t want to spend my day off learning new lines.

“Hey, stranger.” I looked up from my iPad to see Kirk holding a laundry basket. “How was your date last night?”

“How did you…” I said, catching myself. “I forgot I saw you when Bootsy escaped.”

“How is the little guy today?”

“He stared at me all morning wondering why I had to make noise and disturb his sleep.”

“I hate to admit it, but some days I do the same thing when someone wakes me up.”

He found a couple of empty washing machines and loaded his clothes into them.

“What did you end up making last night for dinner? I left before you made your decision.”

“A full-on gourmet meal with all the sides.”

“Yeah, that doesn’t sound fishy at all,” I said, narrowing my eyes.

“We ordered Chinese.”

I cracked out a laugh. When I recovered my breath, I asked, “What about all those groceries you bought?”

“They’re for food during the week. After doing all that shopping, I couldn’t bring myself to cook any of it.”

“I notice you avoided my question. How was the date?”

“Abysmal,” I admitted. “Well, the date part was amazing. The show is horrible. I wouldn’t want to force my ex-boyfriend to watch it.”

“It’s that bad, huh?”

“It’s that bad and then some. I’ve seen a bunch of trash at the theater over the years, but this was a new level of ‘what the heck are they thinking.’ I even said to Ralph—“

“Ralph?”

“The jerk I saw the show with. But we’ll circle back to that little disaster number. Anyway, I said I felt bad for the people working on the show because a lot of those people will be unemployed soon.”

Once Kirk had finished unloading his laundry into the shiny metal washing machines, he plopped in the requisite number of quarters and came to sit next to me on the row of empty chairs. I ran down a laundry list of everything wrong with the show after making sure no one in the room was working on the show. I had made that mistake once. I’d been doing laundry and was talking to Johnny when I started mouthing off about how bad a show was. I was brutally honest and hadn’t seen the poor girl who was in the show until she burst into tears and ran from the laundry. I hadn’t seen that poor girl again. I always wondered if I scared her back to whatever flyover state she’d come from, hoping to make it big on Broadway.

“So, what about Ralph?” Kirk asked.

“He was perfect. He was gorgeous, he said all the right things, he kissed me good night, and I felt like it was a complete princess moment.”

“Princess moment.”

“You know Anne Hathaway in The Princess Diaries . In the movie, Anne has this line that goes something like, ‘You know, in the old movies, whenever a girl would get seriously kissed, her foot would just kind of…pop.’ And the next thing she knew, she’d be standing on one leg as her knee bent and foot sailed into the air. You know, the foot-popping kiss.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen that movie, so I’ll take your word for it,” Kirk said with amusement and skepticism.

“It’s a real thing! I swear. Girls are taught about the foot-popping kiss as kids. We want the foot-popping kiss. And there I was, in full foot-pop mode, and I wanted to swoon. If he’d asked me to run off with him to Paris, I would have done so in a heartbeat.”

“So, how did you go from foot-popping, which I’m still not sure is real, to thinking he’s a jerk in less than twelve hours?”

“Oh, I went from foot-popping to jerk mode in under twenty minutes.” I told him how I forgot Bootsy’s food, so I went to Duane Reade only to find the jerk talking to his wife on the phone after he’d slipped on his wedding ring.”

“Could have been his twin? I mean, if it was one of those old movies, wouldn’t the guy have had some explanation for why he’d done what he’d done?”

“Nope. Not unless the twins are walking around New York wearing the same suit. So, no. Not a twin. Just one royal jerk.”

“Ouch,” Kirk said, shaking his head. “Sorry to hear that happened to you. Sadly, there are a ton of jerks out there in the world.”

“That there are. I’m glad I found out he was a jerk before we’d had a second date or before we’d gotten serious.”

I looked over at my washing machines and it was time to put them in the dryer. “Be right back.” I grabbed one of the rolling carts that helped transfer the clean, wet clothes into the dryer. I looked through what I was laundering. I threw a couple of dryer sheets in the dryer and plunked down more quarters to get the clothes dried.

“What were you doing before I got down here?” Kirk asked. “I didn’t mean to monopolize your time.”

“Not a problem. I was looking at some new lines the creative team sent out. Thankfully, most of the changes aren’t to me, so I don’t have much to work on.”

“I’m always amazed at how you actors memorize those lines. The high school play I was in was a disaster. I forgot all my lines, and when they started coming out of my mouth suddenly, they all came out in the wrong order.” I giggled at the mental image of a young Kirk trying to act when the gobbledygook flowed from his mouth. “That was my first and last time on a stage.”

“I’m lucky. I have an amazing memory for learning lines. Some actors put a lot of effort into learning lines. I’m not one of them. Sure, I must rehearse and practice. And I’ve had a few stage managers yell at me to stop changing the lines. But then, I wouldn’t need to change the lines if the writers wrote them right in the first place.”

“I’m sure writers love hearing that.”

“Of course not, but some of them desperately need to hear it.”

“Do you regularly work with playwrights?”

“Depends on the show. I’ve worked with some playwrights who are in rehearsal every day telling us exactly how the line should be said. Frankly, I want the director to banish those authors from the theater. Theater is collaborative. At some point, the playwright, the composer, the lyricist, or, in the world of musical theater, the book writer, must give up their baby and let the actors and directors do their jobs. If you’re too close to the material, you won’t see the giant, glaring mistakes in the show.”

“How so?”

“I think some directors who are involved in writing the show can get so invested in the show that they don’t want to see the problems. The classic example was Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark .”

“I heard about that one. Wasn’t that show dangerous?”

“Dangerous? No. Were mistakes made on the stage that led to safety problems that should have been caught before actors were harmed? Yes. I think Julie Taymor, who is a brilliant director, got so caught up in making this weird Shakespearean version of Spiderman that she really did not see the giant fiasco that was right in front of her.”

“It couldn’t have been that bad. Was it?”

“Oh, it was that bad, and then some. I don’t think I do the level of horribleness enough justice in an explanation. It was that bad. Again, a director who was so caught up in writing the show that she didn’t see the problems. But anyway, what about you? Why teaching?”

“I was always the kid who wanted to be a teacher. When other kids played army, I wanted to play school. I used to get extra worksheets and bring them home and play teacher with the younger kids on my block.”

“You didn’t!”

“I did. Hey, there were some bright five-year-olds when I was in the second grade. By the time they got to school themselves, they were head and shoulders above their peers.”

“How did you pick which grade you wanted to teach?”

“The grade kind of picked me. I have a general degree in elementary education, then got my master’s in special education. I read that the school districts were not fully serving kids with learning disabilities or behavioral problems, so I decided I wanted to be that guy . I didn’t want to work with the brightest and best students. I wanted to work with those who were struggling. I wanted to help them ‘become the best they could be,’ to steal from the Army.”

“I thought about teaching elementary English for a hot second, but I don’t really like kids.”

“Well, then, it’s a good thing you decided against teaching. There tend to be kids in elementary schools.”

“Exactly.” The buzzing sound of my drier finishing snapped me back to reality. “Time to fold,” I said as I rose off the chair and headed toward the dryer. “Just as an FYI,” I said, leaning in close enough to Kirk to smell his cologne, “I take my stuff back to the apartment to fold. I don’t know when the last time those folding tables were cleaned. Personally, I wouldn’t trust them unless you bring a box of disinfectant wipes to clean them off first.”

“Thanks for the tip. And if you ever need help running your lines or something, I’m next door.”

“I may take you up on that offer.”