It Looked Different on the Model - Laurie Notaro [8]
“Long enough to plot out the entire strategy of my divorce proceedings,” she said. “So far, you decided that we’re going to retain Gloria Allred, have a press conference on TMZ, and then you gave me a voodoo spell to make his teeth fall out.”
“Does it involve lemons, a black candle, and something called cursing oil?” I asked suspiciously.
“As a matter of fact it does,” Jamie confirmed.
“In my dream, that’s what I used on my feet to make the toes shrink,” I said.
“Nope,” Jamie corrected me. “Makes your teeth fall out. We’ll know for sure in three to six weeks.”
“How long did we talk?” I asked.
“Long enough for you to take a trip to Hogwarts and then go shoe shopping,” she said.
“This is crazy,” I said. “I only remember part of it as a dream, but I don’t remember talking to you at all.”
“I’m not surprised,” she said blankly. “You told me you had just taken an Ambien.”
“Ooh,” I cooed, as if I was talking about a cute baby or the surviving snack cake on the dresser. “I love Ambien. I slept all night. Didn’t wake up once!”
“Or did you?” my best friend questioned. “Because if you did, you wouldn’t know about it. Ambien gives you amnesia. Once you’re out, you’re out. People sleep-drive on that stuff and all sorts of other crazy things.”
It was like Nixon calling Frost.
And, it turns out, some people get on their Netflix queues and then get movies in the mail after they’ve made statements like “I have no desire to see Precious, think The September Issue is a far more socially relevant movie, and I don’t care what that says about me as a person.”
It turns out that with one pop of a little tiny pill, I unleash my id, also known as Ambien Laurie. Ambien Laurie, in more basic terms, is my raw monkey form. I don’t really think she plots out her brand of chaos, it just naturally happens, like the formation of the universe. She can be unpredictable. She can be naughty. She can be earthy. I don’t think she does it on purpose, much like monkeys don’t wake up in the morning with plans to rip people’s faces off; it sort of happens in the spur of the moment and if the time feels right. I’ve decided that Ambien is apparently kind of like taking a de-evolution pill, which shorts out the synapses and unwinds any social conventions already imprinted in the brain; for eight hours, I am nothing short of Australopithecus returning to the plains to hunt and gather, and if that means bringing back salty snack foods and snappy sandals to my bed, so be it.
After I realized I was turning into a nocturnal ape zombie who would rip the guts out of any snack cake within an arm’s distance, had access to my credit card, and would delve into the kingdom of the dark arts with little to no provocation, I weighed the odds. And, I’m sorry, there was just no contest. I like sleeping, so if a Twinkie or Devil Dog had to die every now and then at the hands of a teeth-gnashing night-eater, I was cool with that. If a new pair of shoes popped up on my front porch every now and then, that was a thrill, and, I’m sorry, but I don’t see how I lose in this game.
From what I can piece together, the de-evolution of myself to Ambien Laurie is fairly swift, and the entire transformation takes place within a single second. According to my husband, who has in fact seen her materialize, when Ambien Laurie takes charge, I become a very calm yet highly aggressive person, like a gunfighter, who looks at him with an expression that relays calmly, “Sure, go ahead and eff with me. I’ll eat your face off. I’m cool, either way. You make the call.”
To me, however, it goes almost unnoticed until the next day, when I might see what I believe is a shard of wood on the bathroom floor and panic, thinking we might have termites, until I pick it up, realize it is a pretzel, and my mind quickly flashes to Ambien Laurie sitting on the potty and shoving pretzels into her gullet like popcorn at 3:00 A.M. Or when walk into my office and see a cheese cracker sandwich delicately balanced on the corner of the hall table, and I have an immediate flashback of walking