Getting Over Homer by Mark o'Donnell

Author:Mark o'Donnell [O’Donnell, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-80164-7
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-07-13T00:00:00+00:00

“I don’t believe that Anglo-Saxonism at the end is a proper word for songs,” Middling offered after a parched pause.

“It’s supposed to shock,” I explained.

“Snatch and fuck are not shocking. They are disappointing.”

Well, that depends, doesn’t it?

The final test of recovery is to handle new misfortune. I loaned my apartment to Lloyd for a Christmas party, since Lloyd lived in what he called an inefficiency apartment, “a broom closet where the broom couldn’t fall over completely.” Lloyd’s announced theme was A Victorian Christmas, and he borrowed several dolls in period dress from the window dressing supply of the department store where he worked—I could never imagine him speaking to customers—and positioned them diorama-style in my living room as smudged children in a workhouse, or dying of diphtheria, or being slashed by Jack the Ripper. The Victorian-style Christmas tree in the bedroom, which Lloyd insisted on, blazed with real candles, but the presents underneath it somehow caught fire while the guests—all strangers to me, mostly Earth-lings—were just arriving, and it destroyed most of the apartment and all the clothes Homer had given me. If God was making a point there, He could have just sent a note. Weirdly, the dolls all survived unharmed. I will say, however, that there’s nothing like a disaster to take your mind off heartbreak.

My hands and arms got burned trying to put out the yuletide fire, but it didn’t seem to bother me. The fire was impersonal bad luck; it had none of love’s confusing aftereffects. However, after two days in the hospital, I discovered I no longer had insurance coverage. Believe me, the Insurance Company That Cares exists only in the TV commercial. First, they said I wasn’t covered at that time, then that I had never been covered by them. The burns weren’t bad, but being told you don’t exist is unsettling. Milla’s brother Lupo had gotten me a deal with his jewelry makers’ and home craftsmen’s guild, and the insurance company had evidently smelled a scam. When they challenged my affiliation, I emphasized that I did craft my songs at home. Institutions have no interest in metaphor.

I figured I was ruined, or whatever the modern word for it is, but when I checked out of the hospital, I was told my bill was already paid. Lloyd, who hadn’t visited the hospital, had phoned Red, who’d taken care of it. The nurse handed me a message she’d taken down over the phone. It was her unfamiliar handwriting but Red’s voice: “Thanks for the college education. I’m sorry I haven’t used it.”

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