Choke

Chapter 12

IN THE PHONE BOOK, there's more and more red ink. More and more restaurants are crossed out in red felt-tipped pen. These are all places where I almost died. Italian. Mexican. Chinese places. For real, every night I have fewer options for where to eat out if I want to make any money. If I want to trick anybody into loving me.

The question is always: So what do you feel like choking on tonight?

There's French food. Mayan food. East Indian.

For where I live, in my mom's old house, picture a really dirty antique store. The kind where you have to walk sideways, the way you'd walk in Egyptian hieroglyphics, it's that kind of crowded. All the furniture carved out of wood, the long dining-room table, the chairs and chests and cabinets with faces carved on everything, the furniture's all oozed over with some thick syrup kind of varnish that turned black and crackled about a million years before Christ. Covering the bulgy sofas is that bulletproof kind of tapesty you'd never want to sit on naked.

Every night after work, first there's the birthday cards to go through. The checks to total. This is spread out across the black acre of dining-room table, my base of operations. Here's the next day's deposit slip to fill out. Tonight, it's one lousy card. One crapmo card comes in the mail with a check for fifty bucks. That's still a thank-you note I have to write. There's still the groveling next generation of underdog letters to send out.

It's not that I'm an ingrate, but if all you can cut me is fifty bucks, next time just let me die. Okay? Or better yet, stand aside and let some rich person be the hero.

For sure, I can't write that in any thank-you note, but still.

For my mom's house, picture all this castle furniture crammed into a two-bedroom newlywed house. These sofas and paintings and clocks are all supposed to be her dowry from the Old Country. From Italy. My mom came here for college and never went back after she had me.

She's not Italian in any way you'd notice. No garlic smell or big armpit hair. She came here to attend medical school. Frigging medical school. In Iowa. The truth is, immigrants tend to be more American than people born here.

The truth is, I'm more or less her green card.

Looking through the phone book, what I need to do is take my act to a classier audience. You have to go where the money is and bring it home. Don't be choking to death on chicken nuggets in some deep-fried joint.

Rich people eating French food want to be the hero as much as anybody else.

My point is, discriminate.

My advice to you is: identify your target market.

In the phone book, there's still fish houses to try. Mongolian grills.

The name on today's check is some woman who saved my life in a smorgasbord last

April. One of those all-you-can-eat buffets. What was I thinking? Choking in cheap restaurants is for sure a false economy. It's all worked out, all the details, in the big book I keep. Here's everything from who saved me where and when, to how much have they spent so far. Today's donor is Brenda Munroe signed at the bottom of the birthday card, with love.

"I hope this little bit helps," she's written across the bottom of the check.

Brenda Munroe, Brenda Munroe. I try, but I don't get a face. Nothing. Nobody can expect you to remember every near-death experience. For sure, I should keep better notes, hair and eye color at least, but for real, look at me here. As it is, I'm already drowning in paperwork.

Last month's thank-you letter was all about my struggle to pay for I forget what.

It was rent I told people I needed, or dental work. It was to pay for milk or counseling. By the time I send out a couple hundred of the same letter, I never want to read it again.

It's a homegrown version of those overseas children's charities. These are the ones where for the price of a cup of coffee, you could save a child's life. Be a sponsor. The hook is you can't just save somebody's life one time. People are having to save me again and again. The same as real life, there is no happily ever after.

The same as in medical school, you can only save somebody so many times before you can't. It's the Peter Principle of Medicine.

These people sending money, they're paying for heroism in installments.

There's Moroccan food to choke on. There's Sicilian. Every night.

After I was born, my mom just stayed put in the States. Not in this house. She didn't live here until her last release, after the school bus theft charge. Auto theft and kidnapping. This isn't any house I remember from childhood, or this furniture. This is everything her parents sent from Italy. I guess. She could've won it on a game show for all I really know.

Just once, I asked her about her family, my grandparents back in Italy.

And she said, this I remember, she said:

"They don't know about you so don't make any trouble."

And if they don't know about her bastard child, it's a safe bet they don't know about her obscenity conviction, her attempted murder conviction, her reckless endangerment, her animal harassment. It's a safe bet they're insane, too. Just look at their furniture. They're probably insane and dead.

I flip back and forth through the phone book.

The truth is it costs three thousand bucks a month to keep my mom in St. Anthony's Care Center. At St. Anthony's, fifty bucks gets you about one diaper change.

God only knows how many deaths I'll have to almost die to pay for a stomach tube.

The truth is, so far the big book of heroes has just over three hundred names recorded in it, and I still don't pull in three grand every month. Plus there's the waiter every night with a bill. Plus there's the tip. The damn overhead is killing me.

The same as any good pyramid scheme, you always have to be enrolling people at the bottom. The same as Social Security, it's a mass of good people all paying for somebody else. Nickel-and-diming these Good Samaritans is just my own personal social safety net.

"Ponzi scheme" isn't the right phrase, but it's the first that comes to mind.

The miserable truth is, every night I still have to pick through the telephone directory and find a good place to almost die.

What I'm running is the Victor Mancini Telethon.

It's no worse than the government. Only in the Victor Mancini welfare state, the people who foot the bill don't complain. They're proud. They actually brag about it to their friends.

It's a gifting scam with just me at the top and new members lined up to buy in by hugging me from behind. Bleeding these good generous people is.

Still, it's not like I'm spending the money on drugs and gambling. It's not like I even get to finish a meal anymore. Halfway through every main course, I have to go to work. Do my gagging and thrashing. Even then, some people never come across with any money. Some never seem to give it another thought. After long enough even the most generous people will stop sending a check.

The crying part, where I'm hugged in somebody's arms, gasping and crying, that part just gets easier and easier. More and more, the hardest part of crying is when I can't stop.

Not crossed out in the phone book, there's still fondue. There's Thai. Greek. Ethiopian. Cuban. There's still a thousand places I haven't gone to die.

To increase cash flow, you have to create two or three heroes every night. Some nights you have to hit three or four places before you've had a full meal.

I'm a performance artist doing dinner theater, doing three shows a night. Ladies and gentlemen, may I have a volunteer from the audience.

"Thank you, but no thank you," I'd like to tell my dead relatives. "But I can build my own family."

Fish. Meat. Vegan. Tonight, like most nights, the easiest way is to just close your eyes.

Hold your finger over the open phone book.

Step right up and become a hero, ladies and gentlemen. Step right up and save a life.

Just let your hand drop, and let fate decide for you.