Mimi by Lucy Ellmann Read Free Book Online Page B

couldn’t make it to the hall table or something, where I’d dumped it (out of apathy, not incapacity). So I felt I had to open it. The first envelope was from old Gus, for chrissake. What did he want with me? I thought I’d successfully freed myself of his sinister influence decades ago. Wasn’t warping my whole childhood enough for him? But there’s no telling what bug will crawl out of the woodwork these days, with the internet-spurred fervor for reuniting. (Word to the wise: there’s a reason why you lost touch, guys. You hate each other!) How had Gus even gotten hold of my address? In the letter, he informed me that he’d just been let off for stabbing his ex-girlfriend’s mother when she tried to stop him seeing her daughter: the usual kind of scrape he got himself into. His acquittal parties were a regular feature of our high school years. Now he had some proposition for me he wanted to discuss. “Wanna meet?” he asked. no.
    Next in the pile, as if magically drawn to me by my sickbed descent into the past, was a letter from Chevron High, our old high school in Virtue and Chewing Gum. Now and then they’d do a mass mailing to see which of us had died, and I would normally have thrown it straight in the trash. Why should I satisfy their ghoulish curiosity? But under Deedee’s kindly supervision I felt compelled to open it, and inside was a surprisingly cordial, obsequious, even gratifying letter from the new principal, asking if I’d come give the graduation speech that summer. Having never met me, this fellow managed to regard me as a credit to the school, and was sure the students graduating in June, 2011 would be fascinated to hear what I had to say. Chevron would pay my way and put me up at the Chewing Gum Plaza Hotel. . .
    The thing is, speech making is my Everest—it had been an insurmountable difficulty to me throughout life. I’d had trouble giving the shortest of talks at a million medical shindigs. Even intimate, casual clinic meetings to discuss diagnoses, prognoses and lawsuits amongst “friends” could undo me. I’d rather talk to strangers! I displayed all the usual symptoms of stage fright: cold sweats, hot sweats, trembling, nausea, shortness of breath, abdominal cramps, coughing fits, hiccups, stuttering, fidgeting, corpsing, inexplicably rushing, forgetting what I was supposed to say altogether, and bouts of slapstick: I once dropped a whole cup of coffee on the person next to me as I got up to speak (about scalding marks). And what I always wondered was why—why must the show go on? Why is there never any getting out of the show?
    Also, I hated that place. I’d been fleeing Chevron High all my life, and now they wanted me back? And if so—why hadn’t they asked me before ? Did the School Board wearily consult a list of old alumni each year, debating which corny goo f ball could be cajoled into returning? I couldn’t even picture the old codger they’d rustled up for my own graduation. All I knew was, I only had six hours left to lose my virginity before I finished high school, and his speech was taking up one of them! The whole ceremony was just a big interruption of my quest to get laid. Everything was an interruption! The only sage advice I wanted from that old geezer was how to get laid and quick .
    Why didn’t they ask Gus instead? Nothing like an ex-con for speechifying. What did they expect me to talk about ? I’m a surgeon, a manual laborer. No Churchill! Did they want me to rhapsodize on the benefits of getting your double chin rescinded and artificial dimples installed? Or maybe just testify to the great moral principles instilled in us at Chevron High during those four joyless years? All I mastered was Math and masturbation (sometimes simultaneously), and that it sucks to have zits. (“Talk about that!” my colleagues would cry. “Drum up some acne work for us.”)
    I must have been delirious from watching Now, Voyager too many times, because Dr. Jaquith’s