Cool, Calm & Contentious - Merrill Markoe [0]
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Villard Books, an imprint of
The Random House Publishing Group, a division of
Random House, Inc., New York.
VILLARD BOOKS and VILLARD & “V” CIRCLED Design are registered
trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to George Meyer to reprint an excerpt from “Gone, All Gone” by George Meyer. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Markoe, Merrill.
Cool, calm & contentious / Merrill Markoe.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-345-51893-4
1. Markoe, Merrill. 2. Markoe, Merrill—Childhood and youth.
3. Markoe, Merrill—Humor. 4. Writers, American—20th century
—Biography. I. Title. II. Title: Cool, calm and contentious.
PS3563.A6652Z46 2011
813′.54—dc22 2011028395
www.villard.com
Jacket design: Daniel Rembert
v3.1
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
The Place, the Food, Everything Awful: The Diaries of Ronny Markoe
In Praise of Crazy Mommies
Never Again
Why I Love Dogs
But Enough About Me: Narcissism for Echoes
Saturday Night with Hieronymus Bosch
When I Was Jack Kerouac
Bobby
My Advice to the Fidgety Young People
The Dog Prattler
Virginity Entrepreneurs
How to Spot an Asshole
A Chance to Dance
Selfishness 101 (for Dogs)
Medusa’s Sister
Roiling on a River
Jimmy Explains His Wake-up Techniques
Celebrity Criminals and Criminal Celebrities: Celebrity 2.0
Acknowledgments
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
The Place, the Food, Everything Awful:
The Diaries of Ronny Markoe
FOR MOST OF HER LIFE, MY MOTHER WAS VARYING DEGREES OF pissed off. And not just at me. She was pissed off at everyone. But the conspicuous absence of colorful, controversial political and literary figures and/or captains of industry at our dinner table caused me to take the brunt of it.
It was hard to trace her hostility to its origin because she wasn’t introspective. If you asked her why she was so mad, which I often did, she would say that she told you on several occasions to put your dishes in the dishwasher or to change that horrible shirt. That was as deep as it got.
It probably didn’t help that my mother didn’t feel well a lot of the time, afflicted with a wide variety of symptoms, many of which I associated with her always simmering rage. The first time I remember her being hospitalized was when I was in the third grade. We had just moved from New Jersey to Florida. I was sitting on the floor, in the midst of a one-person jacks-playing marathon, when the phone rang. It was her sister-in-law, calling long-distance from New York. I watched all the color drain from my mother’s face as she began to comprehend that her brother had dropped dead of a heart attack at the age of thirty-three.
Not emotionally up to the responsibility of informing my grandmother, who lived with us, that her only son was dead, my mother instead pretended that her brother had survived, then put my grandmother on a plane to New York to go visit him in the hospital. This she confessed to me a couple of hours later, while sobbing uncontrollably during a harrowing drive home from the airport as I kept my hands hovering over hers on the steering wheel, terrified of finding myself, at the age of eight, in charge of a runaway vehicle that was careening into other cars on its way to the middle of a freeway median strip.
A few days later, my mother was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis and hospitalized for two weeks.
From that point on, she never left the house for any extended period, even a weekend, without what she called her “train case”: a portable pharmacy, about the size of a bread box, made of hard white plastic with a handle on top. It opened into many compartments, most of them full of amber-colored prescription bottles. Inside, she always had prednisone, in case of an uncomfortable intestinal flare-up, along with a couple kinds of painkillers—Darvon, Tylenol with codeine, Vicodin, paregoric—as well as Imodium, Kaopectate, Lomotil, Elavil, and those old standbys Valium and