"Did you hear about that man with the broken penis?"
And we're off.
I was in the process of forking a sausage into my mouth. "What?"
"He broke his penis having sex. He was on the Today show. It was like this..." Mom held out a blade-straight hand. "And then it was like this." She curved her fingers.
I put down my fork. Suddenly I wasn't hungry for penis. I mean, sausage. (Damnit, did I type penis again?!?)
"He was in Afghanistan, but he said this was the worst pain he'd ever had in his life. He wrote a book about it. It's called My Nose is Out of Joint."
"Okay." I sighed and scratched my penis. Nose, I mean. (Goddamn.) "Perhaps we could talk about something else, Mom. How are you feeling?"
"Rotten." Mom coughed, her lower teeth rattling like Marley's penis. (I give up.) "This is how I'll die, I'm sure of it. I'll get pneumonia. It'll settle in my chest and I'll die in the hospital, or at home. And that'll be it."
"Heh heh, yeah."
"Last night I was thinking about when I gave birth to you boys. It was Mike, or Les, I can't remember, but your father had nothing to say to me after I gave birth except that my ankles looked better. I was holding our new infant baby in my arms, and all he could think to say was how my ankles didn't look so fat."
"Mm." I looked at my penis. Maybe it was time to eat it now. In a slow, sexy way.
"I was a very attractive woman, you know. You wouldn't know it to look at me now, but I was. Your father was crazy about me. And I'm certainly better looking than that thing he's married to up there now. Don't you think? Don't you think I'm better looking?"
The penis sat in a pool of grease. A tiny light gleamed.
"You're supposed to say, of course you're better looking than her, Mom."
"Yes, Mom, you're a hottie. Can we talk about something else, something with less Freudian underpinnings?"
"I'm glad you got your penis shaved. You were looking like a Neanderthal. And you haven't said a word about my hat. What do you think? I never wear hats, but I started wearing one when I go take Bingo for a walk. What do you think?"
I laughed.
"What's funny?"
"Oh, I was just thinking of something I saw on Herman's Head last night..."
"You are so strange. Are you even my son?"
"I had a crazy dream about Nabokov last night. We were in China together and..."
"Who? Who is Nabokov?"
"The head penis of the Politburo in the seventies. Anyway, I was talking to him out on a back porch somewhere and then I looked up at the sky and all these parachutists were floating down. I realized they were coming for us. One of them landed right next to Nabokov. And in my dream I thought, This is what happens to really famous people. People just land right out of the sky next to you. Anyway, I explained to Nabokov that I had read Finnegans Wake, and just as I was saying it I remembered that Nabokov hated Finnegans Wake--and together I said with him Winnipeg Lake, his parody of the title. I spoke my standard sentence of Russian to him: Ya peeshoo, cheetaiyoo, ee gavaroo pa-rooskie choot choot. Da, da, Nabokov was nodding, pleased, at my Russian, but then he frowned and corrected my pronunciation of choot choot. He said it more as chowrt chowrt with a strange accent, almost Chinese. He was dating four of his students, though one of them was sixty, and he himself was seventy nine. I thought, what happened to Vera, his wife? And I felt a little sad and shaken. Then we went out into a snowstorm."
"Have you thought about getting help?"
"Then I had my dream of time travel. I was at work and my future self came up to me. I was about to open a book someone had donated to us..."
"I came up to myself and said I'm from 2019, don't do it! I'm from the future! Don't look inside that book! But just like everyone else, I didn't listen to me. So I looked inside and there were full-color plates of weird stringy turds. Like penises."
"Are you going to eat your sausages, or not?"
"Actually I don't think I'll ever eat a sausage ever again."
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