wiener dogs get their pelvic itches right often. Weren’t two days ago I saw a bit of the blood on her booger. I figured right then and there it was starting up again.”
Blood on the booger? Her children snickered. I turned to check the dog’s nose, wondering if it had a cold or something. But her nose was black and shiny. No blood. No booger.
“I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about. What do you mean by ‘blood on the booger’?”
She inhaled her nicotine and rolled her eyes up into the fat folds of her brow. Her daughter, who may have been about seven or eight, didn’t flinch. She walked toward the window, poked her head in, and said, “Ma’am, a booger’s a pussy.”
The mother didn’t do a thing but smile and her son cracked up, as did my own son. My daughter didn’t understand what was happening, other than that she had sticky dog milk juices all over her.
“Mama calls the pussy a booger,” the girl said again, because she liked saying it.
“When there’s blood on the booger, the little old vaginer,” the woman said, “you’ll know not to let her get outside.”
“She’ll hump anything in sight,” the little girl said. Then the boy stepped up to the window and explained what hump meant.
My son was on the floorboard laughing, grabbing at his sides, his new front teeth looking huge in his mouth. I thought he was going to wet his pants.
I tried to pry my daughter’s hands from the old hanging-tit dog, but she screamed and cried.
“I love her. I want to take her home.”
“See what I mean?” the booger lady said. “Putt’s great with the kids. I reckon we best be going. I gotta get this money to the bank before Monday.”
She walked off, this two-fannied human kennel who’d just ripped me off with an ancient, gray-haired, saggy-tittied dog that was beginning to howl and grieve, tremble and piss everywhere.
The ride home was the longest in my life. I was short $150 and my daughter had heard the words hump and pussy and she wasn’t even four. I knew I’d made a second mistake. I knew before we got into the driveway that what was about to happen was not going to be a good thing.
“Oh, son, I just wish we’d gone ahead and looked at guinea pigs. They’re a step up from hamsters. Oh, what have we done?”
Oh, why didn’t I just let my husband rule his roost? Why did I have to go on yet another dog search and come home with this poor old trembling wreck?
Because, a voice in my head said, it was meant to be. That poor old wreck of a dog needed rescuing from any kind of fright who would rip puppies right off her chest and call her sacred parts a booger.
Yes, oh yes. It was meant to be. At least for six months, until my husband finally put his foot down. All because Putt hated people, especially men. Especially him.
He didn’t like our four-year-old’s new language either.
We were at our elderly neighbors’ one day, precious Yankees of all things, chitchatting, when my daughter spotted their new dog. She picked it up and tried to look at its hiney.
“Does she get blood on the booger?” my girl asked, and my face flamed with what I knew would come next.
“I’m not sure I understood you, sweetheart,” our neighbor said.
I squeezed my daughter’s hand hard as a warning. “Ouch!” she screamed. “Let go of me.” She turned to the neighbor and smiled, shaking her hand as if I’d broken it. “A booger is a pagina,” she said, pointing to her crotch.
“Girls got paginas. Dogs got boogers.”
Going to Pot
I figured I was pretty close to going to pot when my husband and I took a trip to Cozumel, Mexico, shortly before I turned forty.
Mexicans usually love me. I can always count on these sweet gentlemen to wink or smile or say something flattering, like “La dama es muy bonita,” which I think means “very pretty” or maybe it just means I’m wearing a fine bonnet.
I like to flatter myself and pretend they are seeking more than a green card when they follow me around town, getting all out of sorts even if I’m having a puffy-faced, fat-armed, retaining-fluid day.
My husband and I decided we needed a vacation from parenthood and signed up for one of those all-inclusive deals frequented by fatties and alkies, both of which I could qualify as being, depending on the day.
It was supposed to be four nights of romance and adventure away from our kids. It turned into four nights of my husband either sick with a cold or pretending to be, and me enrolling in every activity alone. Everywhere I went I was solo, and not one man, not even a toothless, wrinkled wreck or a staggering alcoholic, hit on me.
This was one of life’s biggest wake-up calls, even bigger than when the postal clerk quit blushing when I licked stamps in front of him and he told me to move my business away from his counter.
I mean, here I was, a woman without a man, and not a single Mexican was wanting my affections and thus a chance to fly back to America—land of dreams—with me as his bride and ticket to better wages and a McDonald’s in every town. Land of outlet malls and Tommy Hilfiger. Land of Gucci, Vuitton, Pamela, and Britney and other people and possessions those outside our borders find alluring.
This was as bad as walking through a construction site and hearing nary a catcall. This could mean one thing, and one thing only. Someone had gone downhill. Or straight to pot. All that motherly advice about working on my mind had left me with baggy eyes, loose skin, and a goiter stomach. Not to mention the boobs. Let’s, for a moment, leave them out of this.
Each day in paradise as my husband flopped across his bed, hacking and snorting phlegm and bemoaning the bad food and concrete mattress, I’d lounge by the pool or beach in my two-piece suits and even the total drunks wouldn’t so much as glance. If they did, they quickly glanced elsewhere because at these all-inclusives there are Sluts-a-Plenty!
One afternoon while my husband lay curled like a scorpion in the bed and snarling about how miserable he was, I decided to take this all-inclusive resort up on its free horseback rides.
The only ones signed up were me and a couple of geeks who looked as if they lived in a town where the sun hasn’t come out for months. They were wearing matching “I Love Cozumel” T-shirts and were obviously on their honeymoon, thinking they were about to enjoy a romantic romp through paradise on a former Kentucky Derby winner.
A stout Mexican with a nice smile, tequila breath, and only one missing side tooth introduced himself. I was drinking a beer in a red tumbler that appeared to be the type Pizza Hut uses for its soft drinks. The beer, along with the watered-down liquor, was free, and though I’d later suffer a weeklong bout of E. coli, one doesn’t think of such as she sips her diluted offerings and tries to envision the getaway of a lifetime.
The Mexican eyed my tumbler thirstily.
“You want me to get you one?” I asked.
“I’m not supposed to drink,” he said, darting
