ITALIAN PROJECTILE HUMOR
When My Sister Threw Up on My Boyfriend
Signs aren’t just there to control traffic
That Christmas I gave my boyfriend a stuffed pig that oinked out of its squiggly tail and he gave me an Italian translation of Dante with an Italian/American dictionary, I knew our love was subsisting on fumes. He didn't know me and I don’t think I ever properly met him.
I never told him that I was more than the frame he’d mounted me in. Yeah, I read Dante, Plato, and Milton but I also read Daniel Steele, Mad Magazine, and watched Mister Rogers well into my 20s.
My boyfriend, let’s call him Fred, wanted me to be an exotic, well-read, classy city girl. He wanted to date an erudite intelligentsia. I was that. On Tuesdays and Sundays, but on Mondays, I was a jock.
On Wednesdays, I was a pothead. On Fridays and Saturdays, I was perched on a barstool reading Bukowski and talking to bass players, never lead singers. I was also hating myself for reading Bukowski because Bukowski hated women.
Don’t argue with me here, men. Pretend you have a vagina. Then pick up a Bukowski. I don’t think you can pretend you have a vagina any more than you can pretend you know what it’s like to walk around with breasts. Vaginas have no manboob parallel.
Fred thought I was fancy and compared to Fred, maybe I was. I emerged from academia, like a test tube baby grown in a science lab and a library. I knew which books to carry around on buses and not read. I could integrate poems and Joseph Campbell quotes into my daily vernacular. I was that kind of test-tube baby phony.
Fred was from a small town surrounded by dumb jocks (his words) and I was like Joan Didion (my words). He was studying rocket science and, word on the Quads was he was the smartest guy in the program. I liked how tall he was and I found obscenely intelligent men drop-dead sexy.
We had so much in common. Two people who had no idea who the other one was. Match made on a dime-store book rack that was either damp from piss or roof damage.
The year I brought Fred home for Christmas, it looked like we were on our way to getting married. I never brought anyone home before because my family is a tough crowd.
I don’t know if the bar in my family is so much high as difficult to gauge. If we were a limbo game, you wouldn’t see the bar. You would have to guess its height and when you arched back to go under it, it would have clonked you on the head.
Fred loved my house. So many books, such a diverse neighborhood. Such uncookie-cutter houses. Everybody seemed smart.
I wish I were from here, he said.
I kept my mouth shut. Maybe I didn't, but for the sake of this story, let’s say I did. Let’s say I didn’t bust Oz.
My sister has horrible allergies and she keeps Claritin in her pocket. Not the bottle but those little metal sheets where you have to push out a pill one at a time, like a baby. I don't know why removing pills from a pack has to be as complicated as childbirth.
You’re wheezing, your face is red, your throat is swelling and then you have to figure out how to push out some minuscule pill through cardboard thick tinfoil without cutting yourself or mashing the pill. Talk about a camel through the eye of a needle. Try squeezing a pill through a grain of sand.
My sister was sitting next to Fred. She’s amazing. Everybody loves her. If anything, I worried he would fall more in love with her. She’s funny as hell and gives people her full attention. I give people 60% on a good day, 17% on an average one. If men start to bore me, I can’t fake it.
We are sitting there, eating chili and she’s got him laughing so hard he can barely drink a sip of wine without spitting it out on the table. Then her allergies start to act up. She grabs one of those matrix configured pill sheets and tries to push one out. Of course, it’s not easy, but she gets it, eventually, and tosses the pill down the hatch.
Fred is laughing. Mom is filling the wine glasses. My stepdad is leaning back in his chair smoking his pipe. I’m trying to figure out if Fred likes my sister better than me and it happens. She vomits all over him. Projectile. Chili, wine, water, garlic bread. Dinner is re-served on his lap, his shirt, his face.
Oh my god, he says standing up, dripping. My sister has her hand shielding her mouth, but the firehose already opened and you can’t shove water back into the hose.
While investigating the vomit pile, the culprit is discovered. A little metal corner from the Claritin pill sheet. It had gotten caught in her throat. She could have died.
If I liked him more and her less, maybe some shitty part of me would have wished she died instead of vomiting on my boyfriend. In the current circumstances, I liked her way more than him, so I accepted the results.
I used to ignore signs from the universe, but once I opened my eyes to them, it was like there was no zoning for the number of signs the universe could stick into the ground. They were everywhere.
Between the pig, the Italian dictionary, and the vomit, that was Fred’s and my last Christmas. Later he would tell a mutual friend I was the love of his life, but I think he was just trying to control the narrative.
Who wants to say it was all love and romance until someone wound up a pig, laughed at an Italian dictionary, and got vomited on during Christmas dinner? I like my version better but I write comedy and he puts rockets into space.
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