High Heels
Last week, I ate at a Japanese restaurant and sat at one of those hibachi tables that should only be for families and never single, aging men like myself. The chef, while cooking in front of us, occasionally fired a cheap plastic bottle and even cheaper sake into my mouth from a great distance. I was stuck next to a couple from Rhode Island that were sucking back scorpion bowls and growing louder by the minute. The boyfriend, with a lamentable goatee, went on about the ridiculous prices of steaks in Florida. The girlfriend, in a solemn and emphatic manner, repeatedly announced that she didn’t like fish because it’s too fishy. I hated them both immediately. The next day, I had a bastard behind the eyes from all of the cheap booze.
I woke every two hours, which I know because unfortunately, I looked at the clock, something I try to avoid throughout the night. Never look at the clock, otherwise, the thinking begins and the obsession builds over the amount of time you have left to sleep and the number of hours you’re supposed to get. How far past when time was invented did the anxiety of not sleeping your full eight hours begin? Time has been in existence for five thousand years and our planet nearly five billion. If I were a man of science, or any kind of intelligence, I’d make some sense of geologic time versus human time.
In the morning, I was feeling stifled from an unidentifiable source. Maybe it was the heat, the booze, or just the usual and persistent existential dread. Dread—anxiety about the future and throw in some past regrets—successfully diverts the attention from now. Dread knows “now” doesn’t have much going on. Ever. It’s always just now and it’s fairly boring. And so there’s Youtube.
When I finally put my bathrobe on, “High Heels” as we call him, (the pit bull who desperately needs his nails clipped), followed me to the kitchen, the bathroom, back out to the garage, and finally to the master bedroom, bedroom of masters. I was on uncle duty. The little one hadn’t awoken yet so I returned to the kitchen for morning pages with High Heels on my heels breathing his hot breath on me.
Tiotio’s don’t have much more to do than begin to look like hell.
I was writing about my Sunday afternoon lunch at Smith & Wollensky in Miami. Attempts were made to describe our table which overlooked the water channel that connects Biscayne Bay and the Atlantic; a friend who arranged an iPad and large headphones for his five year old son; the adults who consumed rosé, oysters, stone crab, shrimp and lobster; and finally, the children who consumed their screens.
I was interrupted by uncle duties. My niece (who absolutely hates me) was supposed to sleep long enough for her mother or father to come home so that Uncle Andrew, or tiotio as I’m called, won’t have to do much more than be in the house, the only thing I’m good for.
However, she woke minutes after her mother left. When she realized she was stuck with tiotio, there was a meltdown in the kitchen. Through tears and screams, a bubble of snot began to form and she rolled into a child’s pose on the floor. She was immovable until the sobbing wore her out. I dropped her in front of Ryan’s World, a billionaire of a child with a googolplex or more followers, stuck a bottle in her hand and commended myself for subduing a near disaster.
The morning ended with an alarming realization that Vannevar Bush, who theorized that his idea for an electromechanical device would “implement the ways in which man produces, stores, and consults the record of the race,” couldn’t have known that he would be abbreviating the responsibilities for uncles and parents alike. High Heels licked himself and fell asleep.
