Notes. From the Upper West Side. A novel by Dan Wrench. Chapter 61.
The Daddy Free Beach House. The next day was pretty great for me. Maybe it was two days later. Maybe three.
Look, however many days later it was, it was pretty great. I woke up and made sure nobody was around and then walked really quick into the living room and dialed up the Gmail account. Now, I know a lot of you are wondering why. If I wanted to check my email, I had to do it at the family computer in the living room and the answer is that technically, I didn't have to.
But think about it. Suppose I'm the guy who grabs his phone off the nightstand to check for little messages before he even gets out of bed while the wife is lying right there. Staring. Yeah.
First thing she's going to wonder is what I've got going on that can't wait. And she's going to wonder the same thing if I'm checking messages at the breakfast table while the kids need an urgent parental decision. Where Jelly wiped out of one of those little corners between their nostrils and their lips. And if the wife wonders, she's going to ask.
And if she asks, I'm going to answer and if I answer, it's going to be a big fat lie. So my rule is, if the fam is around, I check the email at the fam's computer like it's a duty. An obligation I have to adulthood. Like the only new information Daddy could be expecting in his timid lonely little life is a notice to pay his life insurance premium.
Or some spam advising him of the unclaimed Nigerian money that could be his. Daddy wants to dispatch this obligation early, yes, but not so early that an onlooker might consider him... ...eager. So I looked casually at the screen to check and, yes, reply from Cami Campster, Mecama Camp to the email light center just a couple days before.
Yes, the one where I called her little William. The one that made me want to execute myself only seconds after sending it. At first I wasn't so sure about reading it. The subject line just said re, because she was replying to my email and I hadn't put anything in the subject line.
So I let it sit there for a while with just her name and re. Then I heard the wife bumping around in the bedroom. That meant she'd be out in a second, the boys would be up. I didn't have any time to waste so quick.
I clicked the email and saw it was a couple paragraphs I didn't have time to scan except to see some word that looked like shtump at the top. So I closed the browser quick and started running the little utility that destroys the evidence. Junior thinks it's a virus scan that I run every day, but it's actually killing any little picture or tidbit or texty-thingy that the browser leaves on the fam's PC that could end up making me come home one day to catch the wife sitting at the computer and sobbing. Before she looks up at my face and screams, you asshole!
Then she hires a lawyer to leave me for dead while she goes off to raise the boys in some daddy-free beach house. I tried extra hard to look bored and calm when I heard Junior making her final stomp toward the bedroom door, but when she came out I thought something weird and non-wonderful might be going on, and I may have lost some of the aforesaid, bored and calm look. I thought, maybe she got a job as an extra in some movie and she's been waiting to spring it on me. And why not?
It would be the perfect opportunity for her to play the rule card on me the way I played it on her a couple weeks earlier when I went to work on Little Round Jewish Hat. I mean she definitely wasn't wearing one of her usual outfits. She was wearing this kind of costume like you might see in one of those old MGM period pieces about Cleopatra, or Robin Hood, or Alababa, or somebody. She looked like a slave girl with a bunch of silk scarps and wide metal bracelets on her.
It was like I said, a little disconcerting, and before I'd had my first coffee. But it turned out to be a day job thing. Junior's boss at the Museum of the Humanities, Ed, Ed, Borgen, had decided it would be a great idea if the waitstaff dressed up like whatever characters were in the exhibit the museum was featuring that month. And if the big brass at Moheum went for it, they might make it a regular thing.
And Junior would be dressing up like some historical archetype every weekday. This month's exhibit was of Egypt at the time of the pharaohs. Wow, I said, Ed Moheum? Ed, why not?
Seems like more of a museum of natural history. I said, Junior didn't call me a notal or a wise anheimer or anything, but she assured me there was plenty of museum of the humanities material to be had in Egypt at the time of the pharaohs. I just stared at her. She was definitely looking exotic.
In addition to the scarves and the bracelets, she was wearing this wraparound blouse. The blouse was striped yellow and brown like a tiger, and showed a lot of skin. Junior's cleavage was supple-end, hefting it. It was cum hither cleavage.
Yeah, I could picture it. Egyptian slave girl. Geezer Pharaoh. The queen out of the palace for the evening.
Junior was irritated that morning. Actually, she was still irritated from the day before when Good Ol' Head told some fucktard at the museum that she was in her 40s. The fucktard looked all shocked and said, shit, you're old! In a really loud voice with lots of people listening and now it was a big joke among the waiters Junior had to manage.
And it really isn't fair to Junior because she's a babe. A tish. And because old is an old the way old used to be. It's a sign of fact that if it weren't for my gothic chasm aversion, the one I told you about way back in chapter 6 or 8 or 13 or something, there's no way I'd have cami in my life.
I'd just be looking for new and better ways to make Junior let me jump in her game, like they say in that tribal tune from my tribal youth. And besides, I was ten years older than Junior, and there's no way I'm old. Notes from the Upper West Side is a work of fiction. The people depicted in this work do not exist.
Notes from the Upper West Side. Copyright 2013 to 2018. By Dan Wrench.