Spitball Army

Someone walked by me yesterday and laughed aloud to herself, clearly amused at her own thought which she proceeded to share with me.

“Have you ever seen that movie Drop Dead Fred?” she asked, chuckling, so apparently proud of having made the connection between my name and a film of dubious quality.

“No” was my unsurprising reply.

She stopped her walk-by and made that gaping-hole face, the one where the chin is stretched to its lowest limit, mouth wide open, the head leaning forward to push the person’s face into another’s personal space, the eyeballs protruding from bulging sockets. My prior most memorable receipt of a gaping-hole face was around 2005, when I’d had a facial surgery to remove an invasive tumor and nearly the entire left side of my face was covered with a bandage. A customer came up to me at the Laser’s Edge counter, I greeted him, and he gave me a completely wordless gaping-hole face. And he was a doctor. Who had obviously failed Bedside Manner 101. So I gave him the gaping-hole face right back. And he kept it up. And so did I. But yesterday I just turned back to my work.

“Really? You really haven’t seen Drop Dead Fred?” she shrieked, as if it were a cinematic requirement for living.

I had recently spent parts of four days struggling to complete a viewing of Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900, which, I realized upon concluding it, had generated an urge in me to cuddle up to some Bugs Bunny cartoons to wash the five-hour high art marathon from my brain. Could it be that this low-brow film might be just the thing to nourish my soul? It was, after all, the source of my esteemed former co-worker Scott Findlay’s daily greeting to me: “Drop dead, Fred,” he’d say to me at our first encounter each day, and we’d laugh and go about our business.

“No,” I said to her, “I really haven’t.”

“Well,” she replied, closing and retracting her gaping-hole face, and raising her shoulders as if in victory, “You should. It’s really funny.” And she walked away.

And last night, as if in defiance of her suggestion (but not really), I went home and watched a subtitled documentary about a Brazilian Formula One race car driver who dies in a crash.