wine and cheap perfume

I take back what I said about not wanting to go back. L.A. sucks. Well, it's okay. I sat next to Scott Baio at lunch my first day here, and that was kind of cool. The beach was kind of cool. Being able to sleep in without Louie waking me up at sunrise was cool. The fact that a I saw a guy sitting on the street with a pet monkey wearing a paisley cape was cool. Everything else sucked. The traffic, the restaurants, the people, the fact that there are more Starbucks in Santa Monica than there are hotdog stands in all of New York. There's no soul. Even this guy who was breakdancing on the street was so L.A. I couldn't stand it. He kept talking about his website and his agent as he popped-and-locked shirtless, in a pair of sweatpants with a denim print on them and fake pockets spray-painted on the ass. When I went into a bookstore today to ask about a Virginia Woolf book I need for school, the nerdy little guy behind the computer, in big nerd glasses and a little nerdy sweater vest, asked me how to spell "Virginia Woolf." I thought, "Okay. Time to go. Even the nerds are dumb here."

About five months ago, when I was walking my dog, a portly 50-something woman in a hemp poncho stopped me on the street and excitedly started massaging Louis' perfect little rumpus. Then she noticed his mange.
"Oh my God! Poor thing!" she exclaimed. "He must be so uncomfortable!"
I have this conversation with at least thirty strangers a day. "Yeah. The vet gave me this chemical dip to treat it but it doesn't work," I began, launching into a speech I am so tired of giving I'm sure it's on par with the woman on Broadway who had to sing the song "Memories" in Cats for seventeen years. "But it's supposedly like acne," I continued, "and he's an adolescent, and he'll outgrow it."
And there I stood, in all of my 26-year-old glory, with a face decorated in zits. I didn't outgrow my acne. It stuck with me like a bad habit, so who's to say Louie will ever outgrow his mange? That aside, telling strangers that you dip your adorable white french bulldog in chemicals is a surefire way to garner death glares, which are, for the most part, unpleasant.
"Oh, no!" she cried. "Listen. Give me your number. My father is a vet, and he can talk to you about your dog's mange."
Figuring I had nothing to lose, I gave this queer, kindly stranger my number, and promptly forgot all about it. FIVE MONTHS PASS. Then yesterday, as I'm sitting outside the cafeteria at school with Lucy and Megan, talking about how much we love ourselves for being in grad school, I get a call.
"Hello!" I hear a man's gravelly old voice shout. "This is Dr. Vitka. Amy's father!"
"I'm sorry." I said. "I think you have the wrong number."
"No. You met my daughter on the street last week, and she said that your dog has mange."
I racked my brain, and dimly remembered the Jew fro, the chapped fingers, the poncho. "If by last week you mean last year, then yes. You're a vet, right?"
"Yes I am. I am going to tell you two types of medication you can put your dog on that with cure his demodectitus. Your first option is Mitoban. If you put him on Mitoban, which, in my opinion, is a better choice, his mange will clear up in just a few weeks. A side effect of this drug is that he will suffer a loss of balance. In other words, he won't be able to walk. Your other option is Ivarsibyn. This is gentler on your wallet, but is slower to produce results and has more side effects, which may include nausea, loss of appetite, anxiety, coma, and death."
"They both sound great," I ventured, not really knowing why THE HELL this man was contacting me. His daughter didn't seem like a dyke, and if her roundabout way of snagging a date with a girl was by taking her number, waiting five months, and then forking it over to her ancient vet dad so that he could dispense disturbing and unuseful medical advice for her pet, then she's the weirdest fucking person alive. But I didn't think this was the case.
"But," I continued, "I kind of need my dog to be able to walk. And, you know, not die. So I don't think either option is gonna work. Thanks for the advice, though."
"As you wish," the vet replied. "You now have my number in your phone, so if you ever have any questions or wanna chat about your dog, feel free to call me. What's your dog's name, by the way?"
"Louis," I said.
"Oh. Do you have a nickname? 'Louie' is cuter than Louis."
Was he kidding? No, he wasn't. FUCKING WEIRD. "Yeah, I call him Louie, too, sometimes."
"Okay. Good. I hope Louie gets well soon. Best of luck to you."
"You too. Bye."

What?

Adele Kaplan has lived alone for over thirty years. Her solitude has found a way of both impressing and burdening others. A great woman who prides herself on her independence, she is not so proud as to refrain from calling her family members on a tri-weekly basis and alternately inspiring them with her proclivity for altruistic gestures and progressive ideologies (as a feminist, as an intellectual, as a single person still making her way in the world in spite of her old age and feeble body, bedecked with an alarmingly bulbous midsection) and annoying them with her passive-aggressive ploys to milk them for cash. Her vast body of philanthropic work is underscored only by her unfortunate habit of relentlessly bragging about it. She’s a meddling mother of two, a considerate grandparent of six, and a close personal friend of roughly every geriatric Jewish feminist in New York. She was, among other things, the beloved dean of Rutgers University, a revered professor of International Affairs at New York University, and the head of an adult literacy program that she founded in Harlem in the late 80’s. She’s a voracious reader, an avid theater-lover, and has been known to consume an entire wheel of cheese in one sitting. Her blood pressure is high, her capacity to tolerate shrill or materialistic people is low, and a colony of bread crumbs often reside in the corners of her heart-shaped mouth. She dresses like a foppish lord. She takes her fedora off only to eat, shower, and sleep. She is tough and compassionate, sensitive and tactless. Her hearing is poor, her vocabulary rich, and she’s been known to provide a loud, endless stream of commentary throughout each and every movie she sees (eliciting shushes!-aplenty from neighboring viewers and a beet-red facial hue from whomever had the misfortune of accompanying her to the film). She hasn’t been on a date since 1981; her first husband divorced her because she wouldn’t give him a blowjob; her second left her for an obese felt-maker named Barbara. She is embarrassingly proud of her longstanding friendship with a woman named Charlotte, who is black and works a blue-collar job, simply because Charlotte is black and works a blue collar job. The love of her life was a classmate of hers in high school, “a homosexual named Albie.” She propositioned him on a whim about a decade ago, and he turned her down. This, world hunger, and the fact that her kids don’t call her as often as she’d like make her sad. Her rent-controlled West Village apartment, Animal Planet, and Stephen Colbert make her happy. She is a seasoned traveler, a terrible cook, a pioneer, and my hero.