yustyoking

  

To: <Kevin Feingold; Oxburg, Maryland, USA>

From: <Dede Lopez; Mexico City, Mexico>

Subject: A Proposal

Dear Mr. Kevin,

Business is slow at the travel bureau here in Mexico City. So I have been reading blogs to improve my English.

You write about many interesting people. I wish I knew more about America to understand your references. Who is SOTU? Is that the American president? Why do you call him SOTU? I thought this is the black sauce you eat with Chinese food.

Have you considered writing in Spanish? I translated some of your sentences to Spanish. They are very funny. Especially the vague ones regarding sexual misunderstandings where a woman holds your penis and makes for you some problems. You poor little penis! We have telenovellas where people are upset like this, while off-camera, they are holding a man’s privates and such.

Perhaps you should write telenovellas !

I could help you with the language. As a woman, I can write the woman’s parts and you as a man will write for the men the dialogue. People speak angrily, emotionally. They threaten one another. They threaten to take life of the other person and/or themselves. How exciting! We make together these dramatic stories, you and I write as collaborators, yes?

Please excuse my English and I look forward to working with you on these projects.

Dede Lopez, Mexico City, Mexico

                                                      *

            On Sarah Palin’s Facebook page, she says the GOP needs “commonsense constitutional conservatives” like her.

            They do?

            The First Lady shows up on the Rachel Ray Show— regarding children’s health issues. Not the first person mom and I want to see in the morning. Mom groans, “Oh no!” and quickly changes the channel.

            I don’t need to go fishing for femmes fatales. Help! They’re closing in on me! The Swedish model features a winter hibernation with the sap rising in the Spring. This is America, in the midst of global warming. My body knows neither in nor out. What do I do with Gunhilde, my Icelandic banker? She has one of those short, starched women’s bodies— breasts, hips, legs, arms, torso, neck and head— on a 5’4” frame, everything in exactly the right place. Standing next to her sends testosterone pulsing through my veins.

            Ambivalent to her role as a personal manager, she doesn’t abuse my trust, waiting for the day I will eventually cave to her womanly dominance and let her dispose over my $125,000 fortune deposited in her bank.

            Everyone at the bank wants to help me “invest the money for a better yield.” As long as they get a 4% commission. Even Gunhilde. So far, she simply widens her stunningly painted blue orbs and impatiently waits for me to melt. With so many irons in the fire, I’m not there yet.

            “I mean, you are married,” I point out, eyeing the baroque ring she wears.

            “I couldn’t get to America without marrying an American,” she explains dismissively, all but going “Tut! Tut!” over such a small inconvenience.

            “I spend half my life writing film scripts and a third of my life asleep in bed,” I lament. “By the time I’m finished, I have no time for romance.”

            This is the same complaint I deliver almost every night to my mom at the dinner table. Sharing the house— I own 700 DVD’s and 2,000 music CD’s and she accepts it, complaining volubly— I live a comfortable, exciting life. But I dream of so much more.

            Passionate Oriental ladies licking my flesh, icy blond goddesses laughing in my face, beautiful brunettes tying my hands to the bedposts and ravaging my body, startling redheads shoving their tongues down my throat. All the usual clean-cut, American male fantasies.

            “I don’t understand you at all,” says Gunhilde in her thick Icelandic accent, plopping her cardboard coffee cup noisily on her desk. “You should open up. I’m here for the asking. Take this… opportunity.”

            “To let you handle my banking affairs?”

            Widening her baby blues, she shakes her blond head and says, “Yes-s-s!”

            “This would thoroughly fuck up the feng shui of your office.”

            “I have no idea what you mean,” she tells me huskily. I believe she thinks I’m making a sexual reference.

            “The people working in this bank would be scandalized if you and I start a relationship.”

            “Oh… That would not be good,” she agrees. As an immigrant, she doesn’t want any trouble.

            So, enticingly, tentatively, we are friends, but not more than that. Her husband, it turns out, met her while he worked as a U.S. military radar operator at the air base in Keflavik, Iceland. I, too, would have grabbed her if I was him.

                                                          *    

            The National Herald has a green, front-page photo of the aurora borealis over Tromsö in Norway. It’s very nice to look at in a still photo, but I visited the S-range in Kiruna, Sweden— well above the Arctic Circle— for a rocket launch one winter during the kind of solar flares that cause this kinetic activity. I did not like it. The Northern Lights don’t stand still, looking pretty, they move. Not accustomed to the sky writhing above my head, I suffered a total panic attack. Both amused and alarmed, the locals apologized profusely. They found themselves at a loss over what to do. Pulling up the hood on my parka, Leif suggested earnestly in broken English, “Don’ look at the sky.”

            That did the trick, but really, I wouldn’t recommend this ionospheric effect as a major tourist attraction. If the cold and the long, dark nights don’t get you, the lighting effects will.

                                                           *

            Like everybody else, Gunhilde hustles in the nicest possible fashion. She “helps” customers invest their moolah. Some of these people really don’t know what to do in the world of finance and require guidance. Gunhilde’s ambivalence enters the picture because annuities pay the highest commissions, prompting her and her jolly coworkers to constantly steer account holders in the direction of annuities.

            They also offer identity theft insurance, additional overdraft protection, and consumer buyer protection plans (“You don’t like what you bought, you return it for a refund. Always”). They can sell you household insurance, auto insurance and life insurance. Each one at the rate of $17.98 a month, deducted automatically from your account. No bookkeeping! The bank’s computer bleeds your account dry without requiring you to lift a finger!

            Such service!            

             I’ve been to Iceland four times. The women are other-worldly.

            Gunni (dare I use a nickname?) spends a lot of effort pleating and braiding her honey-blond hair. Her ‘do goes in about six different directions, a visual confection, tied in bows and held in place with colored plastic combs. When I see her in her white PVC trenchcoat and low black heels, my body hums to the rhythm of her heartbeat.

            What about the blue dots, dead center, above and below her eyes, on the upper and lower eyelids? Girls have worn eyeliner since I was a kid, but I do not understand these Bjork-influenced dots. Stranger than strange— “Now for something completely different!”— they’re so far outside the box, they turn a negative into a positive. How can you not stare into her pale blue orbs when they are accentuated by those weird dots? You can’t.

            I can’t.

            Not.

            Stare.

            I’ve seen her, sitting in her office, staring down customers, steering them in the direction she wants them to go.

                                    Train me, baby

                                    Train me tonight.

                                    Make me feel

                                    My life is right.

             Part of the problem is location: Every time I go in the bank, there she is, strutting in low heels, clack! clack! clack!, that announce “Here I am. Check out this body!”

              She’s said as much: “Growing up, everyone remarked about my classic Icelandic looks. I met Johnnie in a bar after winning runner-up in the Miss Iceland Contest. I was there celebrating with my friends. He asked me what the tiara was for. I told him, ‘It’s for you!’ After that moment, he couldn’t leave me alone. He still can’t take his eyes off me! And we’ve already been married three years. He’s a crazy man.”

               Depositing checks with Donnie the teller, a displaced Irishman, on a Friday afternoon, I see G in her PVC white, belted trenchcoat, looking like she just stepped out of a fashion mag. It would be hard to miss her, she stands right in the center of the room, looking distracted. When I complete my transaction, she’s still there. I don’t have the ego to think this has anything to do with me.

              “Waiting for a bus?” I ask. She stares into my baby browns and does her widening, widening of the eyes bit.

              “I’m leaving for the day,” she tells me in that husky contralto that makes my ears ring. She stalks past, almost knocking me over. She parades out the door into yellow sunlight. I go trotting after her. Good doggie! “Walk me to my car,” she commands.

               “You know,” I tell her, “I never talk to you socially because for me, you are a very dangerous woman.”

              “I am not dangerous!” she insists, worried as usual about getting deported.

               “I mean, I like you too much. You’re not only beautiful, you’re intellectually brilliant. I avoid people who are smarter than me. You’re way brighter than I am!”

               My extremely cynical Uncle Izzy once lectured me (he was a college professor in Political Science), “When you talk with a beautiful woman, don’t just compliment her looks. She hears that from everybody. Instead, tell her what a genius she is, how you admire her for the quality of her braininess. Since most beautiful women haven’t developed their higher faculties, this declaration will charm her. You’ll get to fuck her, where others have gotten shot down.

               “Praising a beautiful woman’s intellect is a sure way into her panties.”

                Cynical.

                He also told me, “The publishing industry is full of fairies. If you wish to become a published author, sleep with an editor at one of the big publishing houses.”

                I didn’t sleep with a man, but I took his first dictum to heart. I have developed an approach that works with some of the world’s most exotic creatures.

               “Oh, I’m not so smart,” Gunhilde ruminates, taking the bait. A radiant smile tugs at the corners of her mouth. Head thrown back, her pert little nose points to heaven.

               “Well, I think you are,” I bray like a donkey. Playing the blockheaded cretin pleasantly excites my lower extremities. Gunhilde glances at my pants and smirks.

                “We should get to know each other better,” she says, pressing my arm with her little Scandinavian hand. A child of nature, she wears clear nail polish.

                “Yeah. Yes. Well, we’ll see.”

                 Why does it not surprise me that she drives a Volvo?

                  “I have a gold bellybutton ring, but I never get to show it to anybody.”

                  “I understand. Americans are funny that way. You’re not supposed to show your navel in public.”

                  She begins undoing her belt.

                  “Uh, no, no, no,” I stammer, glancing frantically around the parking lot.

                   “You should see it… someday,” she replies ruefully, giving me a withering look. At least she’s not baring anything here, next to the bank. In this brilliant sunlight, everything stands out a mile.

                  “Have you ever made love in a Volvo?” she asks.

                  “Ah! Now you’re getting personal,” I joke.

                  “I’ll schedule you for an appointment,” she remarks, falling back on her business school jargon.

                 “Pencil me in.”

                  “I always use a pen,” she replies wonderingly.

                   This is one wonderful lady! Very efficient, very officious. I guess they never got to the chapter about colloquial phrases.

                                                      *

                  My 90-year-old mom sleeps more now and has begun to suffer a series of memory lapses. This is upsetting in someone whose steel trap of a mind always demanded exact information of both herself and others.

                  As my little brother Tim says, “When paired with a navigator in a military exercise, the first thing to do is take away his map and compass. If you depend on him, you’ll both become hopelessly lost!”

                  Unfortunately, that’s started happening with mamman. Her driving directions often leave us stranded on a side road in the wilds of Maryland.

                                                      *

                   Madonna performs the halftime show at the Super Bowl, a real Las Vegas style extravaganza. She leads off with “Vogue,” featuring all the same embarrassing dance moves and choreography from her shows in the 1980’s. Michael Jackson, Britney Spears and Madonna, dance, dance, dance. During her second number, “Music,” she misses a back step on the bleachers and her left leg disappears off the back of the stage. Looking terrified, she pulls herself up like a trooper and strikes a pose of sexy defiance.

                    The lady’s a champ.

                    Of course, this still doesn’t answer the paparazzis’ question to Bruce Willis: “Is Demi Moore getting professional help?”

                     Are any of us?

                                                       *