The Potty Mouth at the Table by Laurie Notaro Read Free Book Online

bleeding.
    The good news is that I did not say the first thing that popped into my head: “Holy shit . . . that’s a bloody cupcake.” The bad news is that I did say the second thing that popped into my mind, which was “You’ll never make enough money in your lifetime to get that thing removed.”
    After a stunned silence in which ten pairs of eyes were on me, including those of the proud bearer of the curiously behemoth cupcake, I had drawn a showstopping blank. Looking at them, I was stunned. Really? “Amazing”? I thought to myself. Our friend just ruled out any chance of running for Congress or, however unlikely, walking a Christian Dior runway, and all you guys can say is“Amazing”? Everyone was staring at me, and for a moment I was very confused, until I finally got it. Ha-ha. They were playing a joke on me. It was a joke— a joke! A wave of relief washed over me as I laughed at myself and replied, “Oh, thank God. It’s just a decal from Hot Topic! For a minute I was scared shitless you really had a flaming cupcake etched on your back for all eternity!”
    Except no one laughed back. I caught a couple of them looking silently at each other, clearly as stunned at my response as I was when I saw the Chernobyl-size cupcake. And then my friend, the one who now had a flaming cupcake etched on her back for all eternity, turned around, and with the same flames shooting out of her eyes that she had on her back, told me sharply, “It’s not a decal.”
    We didn’t talk much after that. She didn’t speak to me for . . . well, really, ever again.
    The lesson here is that a giant cupcake tattoo is typically an indication of two things: (1) Sister got her hands on some crystal meth, and (2) Sister smoked that crystal meth and kept smoking it until she had been awake for seven days and then stumbled into a tattoo parlor with a really bad idea that she had quickly sketched on a napkin from Carl’s Jr.
    If your friend pops up with a gargantuan flaming cupcake the size of a hubcap or medium-weight primate tattooed on her back, without question, throw her into thenearest cargo van and get that girl into rehab. Now. That’s really your one and only option. 1 All I ever say now whenever anyone reveals a tattoo to me, whether it’s an earlobe-to-collarbone declaration of “Child of the King!” scribed in Old English–type letters (exclamation point and quotation marks included) or a hummingbird that looks more like a protozoa, is, “Oh, wow. That’s amazing.”
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    1 . This would be aside from generally advising against a back tattoo, especially since tattoo “artists” have figured out you have just paid for something the quality of which you will never be able to determine with your own eyes.

LIVE FROM THE BELLAGIO
    I t’s three o’clock in the morning, I’m in a Seattle hotel room, I’ve already thrown up eleven times, and the only thought left in my head after evacuating the rest of my system is: Jesus Christ, I hate falafel .
    I didn’t even want to order falafel. I didn’t. I wanted to order chicken tikka masala or saag paneer at the Middle Eastern/Indian restaurant, but I only had an hour before a reading and I couldn’t, in good conscience, go and talk to people with saag paneer hanging ominously on every breath I expelled. So I went with falafel; it’s a safe bet, I figured—cute, contained, and, added bonus, fried! Falafel can do little to no damage, unless you count the bed of shit-tainted lettuce that it lounged upon like a concubine in a harem.
    With the first bite, I had sealed my fate; by midnight, I was living the nightmare of every traveler: sweating, shivering, and leaning over a toilet in a hotel room like Kate Winslet in Contagion, the only movie in which she kept her shirt on, mainly because her character dies before she can get in a compromised situation with a married man.
    I would have gladly taken off my shirt in front of everyone who was still alive at my thirtieth high