I'm Sleeping In The Garage: A Book Review

OK, the first thing everyone needs to understand is this:

It's not my fault.

That said, I'm not quite sure who's fault it is. There are numerous candidates. Amazon.com, for example. I ordered the books at the same time and they should have been shipped at the same time. Or how about Citadel Press? Why have a first printing that amounts to about twelve fucking books? Had those boys been one their toes, there'd have been no delay on Amazon.com's part. Of course, I could just cut to the chase and blame Steve H. Graham for writing it in the first place.

Then again, maybe the fault really lies with Grandma Incontenentia Peasant, God rest her soul.

Irrespective of fault, the bottom line is that I read The Good, The Spam and The Ugly last week and now I'm sleeping in a Goddamn garage in the middle of Ohio in the middle of March. Despite that, I recommend the book to anyone who enjoys a really good laugh.

Actually, if it had just been a matter of me reading The Good, The Spam and The Ugly and nothing else, I'm pretty sure that none of this would have happened. In the cold light of hindsight, it seems the arrival of Graham's first book, Eat What You Want and Die Like a Man, followed in quick succession by the arrival of a massive head cold had a lot more to do with my ending up in the garage than laughing out loud one too many times while reading The Good, The Spam and The Ugly, which happens to be the "official" reason I'm garaged.

As my regular readers know, I reviewed Steve H. Graham's Eat What You Want and Die Like a Man a while back. In it I found much to love, both in terms of humor and mouth-watering comestibles. Upon finishing the book, I had made plans for the immediate manufacture of enough chicken fried steak, hash brown casserole and cream gravy to take me to either 300 lbs. or the heart attack emergency ward at St. Ann's. Before I could get to the store, however, I managed to contract the worst cold I've experienced in the eight and a half years since I quit smoking a pack and a half of Winston cigarettes on a daily basis. I just didn't have the energy to spend on cooking up that much fat and cholesterol.

I did know, however, that I was going to have to fix myself something healthy to get me through my illness or Muffy was going to start whipping up big pots of herbal vegetarian tofu soup to pour down my protesting throat. And as any guy knows, the only way you can get out of being subjected to your wife's home remedies is to assert family primacy and use your own family's home remedies. That's where Grandma Incontenentia (we called her Grandma Connie) comes into the picture. She lived to be 96 years old and could, when properly motivated, kick the shit out of anyone in the family, including Dad, up until she was about 80. Given that, when Grandma recommended a dietary regimen, you listened.

Her regimen was both simple and completely constant: Eat fiber.

That's it. Grandma Incontenentia was a big believer in colonic cleanliness as the wellspring of all bodily health. As I was growing up, if anyone in the family got so much as a case of the sniffles, Grandma would be over to the house in a shot, carrying a huge pot of bean-based soup. And not just for the afflicted. Everyone had to eat that soup for prevention's sake. Most of us kids had no clear idea of what a colon was, all we knew was our had to be clean or Grandma was going to get pissed off. We Peasants where one very health, very regular family back then.

You know, I had never heard of Ex-Lax until I was about 35.

In any event, once the cold hit me, I told Muffy I was going to make a big pot of Steve's Navy Bean Soup to get me back to a state of wellness. She gave me one of those doubtful looks she's been giving me for roughly 25 years. She was conflicted, but she couldn't really protest. That's because on the one hand, knowing how my gastrointestinal tract works, she didn't want me anywhere near a pot of beans. On the other hand, she was somewhat relieved I wasn't making my own recipe for bean soup, which involves between 15 and 16 types of beans, broccoli, cauliflower, smoked sausage, onions, leaks and a ham hock all cooked until everything blends together. Muffy thinks it's gross, but I like it enough to overlook the fact that it has the consistency and look of freshly poured concrete.

"Why don't you make something else, too. Just for variety's sake," she commented.

Once again, it's easy to look back now and realize that what she didn't mean was me making an equally large pot of Steve H. Graham's Unauthentic White Anglo-Saxon Chili. But that's what I did. And for the next three days I eat nothing but Navy Bean Soup and Unauthentic White Anglo-Saxon Chili. By the end of that third day, I was pretty sure my colon was cleansed, despite the fact that I still had my cold.

On Day Four, The Good, The Spam and The Ugly finally arrived at my door.

That's when things started to go downhill.

Fast.

That particular day, the cold had worked its way up into my sinuses. I had a head full of mucus that simply wouldn't be dislodged. Now the Unauthentic White Anglo-Saxon Chili I'd made was pretty damn spicy, so I decided to load up on that, working on the theory that the jalapenos and the habanero sauce would aid in unclogging my noggin. In theory, it should have worked. What I did not make allowances for, however, was the law of unintended consequences. That came late that night, long after Muffy and I had retired.

Under normal circumstances, Muffy and I both read in bed for a while prior to turning in. It's like that once you get around 50 years of age. And, under the normal circumstance of those normal circumstances, I'm the one who closes my book and turns off my lamp first. But on this particular night, I simply couldn't breathe laying down, so I continued to read well after Muffy gave up and retired to dreamland. As I had just received The Good, The Spam and The Ugly, it was only natural that it was the book I was reading that evening. I had enjoyed Eat What You Want and Die Like a Man, was miserable with that stupid cold, and certainly in need of a good laugh to brighten my spirits. In theory, that should have worked, too.

But it didn't, and that's where the law of unintended consequences comes in. What I didn't intend, after eating three squares of Unauthentic White Anglo-Saxon Chili, was to get backed up with methane. But I did. Now normally that isn't a big deal. Most of us married men learn, during that first crucial five years of marriage, how to poot under the sheets without drawing spousal wrath. Unfortunately, it turns out that it is virtually impossible to manage the methane while laughing.

I know that now.

The first laugh-out-loud laugh came somewhere in the neighborhood of page 50. It woke Muffy up, much to my surprise. Normally she's a pretty sound sleeper.

"What was that?" she said, rolling over to face me.

"What was what?"

"What was that noise?"

"I didn't hear anything."

That's when it hit her.

"What… what is that smell… Dennis!"

"What?"

She wrinkled her nose.

"That's disgusting. Turn out the light and go to sleep."

"In a minute."

"One minute. Then lights out."

And with that she rolled back over and fell asleep.

It wasn't until page 135 that I lost all control and again laughed out loud. Don't misunderstand, I'd done some serious giggling, and had had to bite the pillow several times, but I hadn't lost it. I guess because I had been concentrating on multitasking the reading of the book, not laughing out loud and keeping the methane-related noises to a minimum that I hadn't noticed that at some point I no longer had any of the covers. Muffy can be pretty acquisitive of the blankets at times, so unless it really gets me good and cold, I often don't notice the lack. That was the case this time. Anyway, the page 135 laugh woke her up again. She was displeased.

"I thought I told you to turn off the lights," she said groggily, without moving.

"You said 'in a minute'."

"Turn out the light. And give me back the covers!"

At this point I had not taken my eyes off the book.

"I don't have the covers. Why don't you give me some covers?"

Before Muffy could respond, the dog started barking. What the dog was barking at was something she had never seen before, which was the sight of a bed sheet, blankets and comforter hovering about three feet over the bed itself. Neither Muffy nor I had hogged the covers this time. And for me, that was a bad thing. Muffy sat up and stared, trying to figure out what was going on. I was beginning to sense danger.

"What is going on here?" she asked through gritted teeth.

The dog knew what was coming and stopped barking. For my own part, when faced with her laser-beam eyeballs-of-death stare, and being pretty much frozen in fear, all I could manage was to fall back on the last desperate ploy available to the married male of the species…

"What?"

The word had barely come out of my mouth when I could tell it had hit her. Her nose wrinkled again and she knew why the covers were three feet off the bed.

"You…," she sputtered, "You are disgusting!"

"I'm sorry. I've been sick all week…"

Given a moment or two longer, I might have been able to talk my self out of enough trouble to at least to be allowed to sleep in the guest bedroom. But luck wasn't on my side…

For those of you who don't own a long-haired dog, it may come as a surprise that under certain conditions, such as, say, the sort of low humidity and dryness that one gets in a house during winter, a dog rubbing against, say, carpet, can generate static electricity. That's what happened at this precise moment. Our dog, sensing that I was seconds away from being either maimed or murdered by my beloved Muffy, tried to climb under the bed. When she did, there was a spark of electricity.

Do you know what happens when a concentration of methane meets a spark?

Actually, that's a bit of a trick question, because a number of things besides the obvious minor explosion happen. Things that you'd never expect in a million years. For example, I can tell you one unexpected thing that happens:

Hairspray melts.

The sort of hairspray, for example, that keeps Muffy's bouffant hairdo in place. The hairspray on Muffy's head melted and that bouffant slid off the top of her head. It came to rest, in short order, on side of her head.

It sort of looked like she'd glued a mop to her right ear.

If I hadn't already been in fear for my own physical safety, I might have found the sight of Muffy's sideways bouffant kind of funny. But for me the time for funny had passed. I was already running like Hell to get out of that bedroom. I was in the hallway, running for the stairs when I heard the strangled scream of anguish that could only mean that Muffy had seen her image, and her hair, in the dresser mirror.

And that's why I'm sleeping in the garage.

In fairness to my lovely wife, it only took a couple of hours of pleading before Muffy cooled off enough to give me a pillow and some blankets. And fortunately the Volvo is pretty well soundproofed, because if Muffy had heard the laugh I let out an hour later when Steve H. Graham induces a Nigerian spammer to visit a web page containing the picture of one of Steve's college buddies dressed in a leather biker outfit, complete with a leather jock covered in metal studs, she really would have gutted me right then and there.

So all I have to say at this point is read The Good, The Spam and The Ugly.

Just don't do it the way I did.

Comments

[richard mcenroe]

I just gave Steve a stern talking-to on your behalf...

[Steve H.]

Dude, I am REALLY sorry about that chili. I should have said something. It has nearly killed me on many occasions.

But thank you for writing this great review before dying.

Let me know if you want to see the new cookbook before it comes out.