For a couple of years, I was a spokesman for a brand of prepackaged salads—combinations of the more popular lettuces, sometimes including a smattering of shredded carrots, all conveniently washed and cellophane-wrapped for the health-conscious man or woman on the go! The gig paid pretty well, and I liked the work: developing salad recipes, posing for a few photos while holding salad, and being interviewed by journalists about, yes, salad. Easy, if typical, spokesman stuff. To mix things up a bit, I tried to convince the salad marketing team to think outside the plastic bag and sponsor a contest I could host called the Great American Toss Off, during which hundreds, maybe thousands, of really gorgeous people could slather themselves in ranch dressing and frolic in a giant swimming pool filled with arugula. I would watch that all damn day, I said, but they didn’t bite.
Instead, the company held a more straightforward contest: Tell us why YOU love salad and you could win a trip for two to Napa Valley! While there, the winners would go wine tasting, take a cooking course at the Culinary Institute of America, and receive a styling lesson from me.
About a week before I was supposed to fly out to California, I called my endorsements agent at the time, Jason, to confirm some of the details of the trip, specifically the expectations surrounding this “styling lesson.” I had assumed it was the “How to Dress Your Body Type” speech I had given dozens of times across the country.
“Not quite,” Jason said. “They want you to talk about styling your salad.”
“I don’t know what that means,” I answered.
“You know, how to make your salad look pretty.”
It took me slightly longer than usual to process the words that had just come out of his mouth. “That’s ridiculous. How long am I supposed to talk about this?”
“You’re contracted for two hours.”
There are things I can drone on about ad nauseam, but decorating lettuce is not one of them. “Two hours? You have got to be kidding me,” I said. “You make salad look pretty by putting it on a nice plate and sprinkling some . . . I don’t know . . . chopped pecans on top. Now, how long did it take me to say that? Three seconds, max? What am I going to do for the other one hour, fifty-nine minutes, and fifty-seven seconds?”
Eventually Jason calmed me down, by basically lying through his teeth. “They’ll be so glad you’re there,” he said. “You can talk about whatever you want, salad, clothes, decorating. Just talk and smile. Get your picture taken. Then cash the check.”
I’ll be honest; that part about the check made me feel a lot better about the whole situation.
When I arrived at the culinary institute on the Sunday morning of the grand-prize weekend, the contest winners and their guests were watching a chef cook a pork loin. So I took the opportunity to ask the organizer to clarify my role. After the demo, she said, the winners were going to create their own salads, using the prepackaged blends (of course), and I would help them with their plating, because each salad would be professionally photographed.
“Do you have a nice selection of plates?” I asked. I had told my agent the marketing team should supply me with as many options as possible. Plates, theoretically, could go a long way in salad styling. “Maybe some pretty colors? I could show them how to mix and match patterns. Or create an interesting table with a combination of antique and modern pieces.”
“All the plates are white,” she said.
I took a deep breath through my nose, while nodding and smiling in hopes of disguising my blinding rage. “Okay. That’s cool,” I said. “I’m just curious if Jason had mentioned having a big selection to pull from.”
“He did,” the organizer said, “but we decided that the plates should be white to really showcase the salads themselves. And we don’t want you to do the salad styling for the winners, we want you to inspire people to use the plate that best reflects their vision.”
So, for two hours, I walked around an industrial kitchen, interrupting couples who were grilling shrimp or searing steaks or whisking vinaigrettes to suggest different white plates.
“You know what would look amazing under that salad,” I said to a mother and daughter. “This plate because . . . it’s a triangle. And how often do you see that? Not often enough, if you ask me. Think about the significance. Earth, wind, fire. Father, Son, Holy Spirit. It can symbolize whatever you want.”
After an hour or so, I tried fanning the flames of not-so-friendly competition among the breeders. “See that couple over there?” I asked a late-thirties husband and wife from Michigan, whispering and nodding my head toward a couple of newlyweds from Florida. “They’re using a high-gloss oversized round. Big mistake. Huge. Who’s going to be looking at their salad when it’s on top of that gaudy thing? Ah, but this plate. It’s ivory with a matte finish and not too much rim. There’s no way this plate is going to steal your salad’s thunder.”
They looked at me as one might have expected them to, like I was batshit.
Two hours felt like a thousand days and nights. Basically, I was the Scheherazade of Salad, just making up nonsense to avoid not death, but a breach of contract lawsuit. I needed a drink, a massage, a pill. Pretty much anything to make this day go away. Luckily, my friend Lisa was awaiting my return in the very expensive hotel room where we were staying. Usually if there’s a companion airline ticket included in an appearance deal, and I’m traveling somewhere fun or beautiful, Damon will come with me. But he had recently entered the final stretch of writing his dissertation, so he asked if I would mind terribly if he sat this trip out. I didn’t mind at all. I was thrilled he was this close to finishing his doctoral degree. It was hard to believe, but after eight years of his studying and researching, I might someday live in a home without twenty oversized textbooks and huge piles of psychology journals cluttering the dining room table. “Do what you need to do,” I told him, mimicking Ingrid Bergman’s Casablanca stare. “I’ll miss you, darling.”
Lisa was thrilled to accompany me in Damon’s stead. She always is. Doesn’t matter where we’re headed. I once brought her with me to a mall in Milwaukee, and you would have thought she was strolling the Champs Élysées. “I’m just glad to get away from the trolls for a few days,” she said when I asked why she was skipping through the mall. “The little sons of bitches always want so much from me, like food and . . . well, food.” The trolls were her two teenage sons. She’d left them fifty bucks and her car keys on the kitchen counter with a note that said, “Good luck, fuckers. I’m out.”
While I’d been degrading myself in the promotion of leafy greens, Lisa had been renting movies in our hotel suite and ordering room service. “I just watched an entire Japanese film—in Japanese. No subtitles. While eating a Kobe beef burger,” she said when I got back to the room. “This may just be the best day of my life.”
I kicked off my shoes and picked at the cold fries on her plate.
“How was your day, America’s Sweetheart?”
“Stupid,” I said.
“Well, let’s go do something. We could sit by the pool. Or get drunk. Or both.”
All were perfectly agreeable suggestions, but I had been hoping to have a mud bath in a spa I liked a few miles up the road in Calistoga. I called to check their availability, and they were booked for the day. So I called two other spas. Still no luck. At the fourth spa, they had one appointment open, but there was a catch. I consulted with Lisa.
“They only have one appointment,” I said, holding my hand over the microphone. “And it’s for couples.”
“What’s the problem,” she said. “We’re a couple. A couple of assholes.”
I booked the mud baths, unsure why I even hesitated in the first place. Having been best friends continuously since junior high, Lisa and I are like two peas in a twisted pod. We often tell people, hospitality workers mostly, that we’re married, just to watch the expression on their faces slowly change from coolly welcoming to wholly confused. “We’re on our honeymoon,” she proudly stated to a maître d’ in Honolulu, while I stood behind her braiding a little strand of her hair. “We’re celebrating our twenty-fifth,” I once confided to a concierge in Key West, “but, please, don’t tell anyone. We’re keeping it hush-hush for obvious reasons.” He answered, “Twenty-fifth what?” In reply, I stuck my tongue in my cheek and wriggled it around a bit. It just seemed like the right thing to do. He didn’t ask any follow-ups.
The girl behind the front desk of the spa was pretty and young. She struck me as the type who played varsity field hockey: long, lean, no makeup, and a golden tan. Her name tag said BRITANEY and so I immediately hated her parents.
“Oh. My. God. You’re from What Not to Wear,” she said when we checked in.
“That’s me.”
“Oh. My. God. I love that show. I always wanted to nominate my mother. She needs you, like, so bad. She wears sweatshirts and mom jeans. All. The. Time.”
Because approximately five thousand teenage girls tell me that every year, I have a pat answer: “You should totally go to our website. There’s, like, a form for that. And I shit you not: We actually read every nomination.”
“I’m so doing that,” Britaney said. I knew she wouldn’t. That’s why I didn’t feel bad about lying to her. The producers would never even consider flying twenty crew members in from New York to ambush some dumpy mom in Calistoga. If she had lived closer to a major airport, maybe. And only if the casting department could find three other women nearby with different style problems. What I wanted to say more than anything else was, Don’t worry about your mother, Britaney. Save yourself. Save your goddamn self!
“You’re signed up for a couple’s mud bath,” she said after checking her ledger.
“Yup.”
“It’s for two,” she said, by way of clarification, I suppose.
“I’m one,” I said. “And she’s two.”
Lisa chimed in: “And we can’t wait to get naked together. Do we take off our clothes here? Because I can.”
“No,” said Britaney. “Please don’t. I’ll show you to your room.”
She led us down a long hall to a private vestibule for getting undressed that connected via a wooden door to the treatment room itself. Inside it were a large L-shaped mud bath, a curtainless shower, and a bubbling mineral tub big enough for two, which were to be used in that order. Mud, rinse, soak. “If you need anything, just call,” Britaney said, without pointing to a phone or intercom of any sort.
Despite what we tell certain service professionals, Lisa and I aren’t exactly comfortable being naked around each other. Sure, we had gone skinny-dipping in the ocean together for years—we spent practically every warm day together at Smith’s Point Beach on the south shore of Long Island throughout high school and when I was home from college—but our swimwear never came off until after we were submerged up to our chins in the water. Then, we’d float for hours, holding our bathing suits in our hands and laughing about the horny electric eels and pecker-craving piranha lurking, unseen, beneath the surface.
We undressed quickly, facing opposite directions, and I grabbed a white waffle-knit robe from the peg near the door. “See you inside,” I said and sprinted into the treatment room.
A combination of volcanic ash and earthy peat, the mud was dense and dark but also rather fluffy—and hot, thanks to the scalding, mineral-rich water that was pumped in from an underground geothermal spring. Once properly submerged, I had the sensation of being trapped inside a soaking wet, sulfur-stinking sponge, which is more enjoyable than it sounds if you’re willing to believe the environmental and psychological toxins you’ve been hoarding are fleeing your body like bats out of a smoky cave. Make me feel better about my life, mud gods. I don’t want to be a salad whore anymore.
Lisa entered after I had placed two cucumber slices and a cool, damp washcloth over my eyes. “Now what?” she said.
“You do the Dance of the Seven Veils. What do you think, you do? Get in.”
“How do I do that, smart ass? This thing’s taller than I am.” The tub had a wide flat edge, covered in white tile, which rose about three feet above the ground. At six foot four, I was able to step right over it. For Lisa, five feet tall on a good day, it wouldn’t be so easy.
“Hop up on the side, swing your legs in, then lie down like I am.”
From the sound of it, grunting mostly, Lisa was taking my advice. “OK, I’m in,” she said, “but this doesn’t seem right. I’m just sort of lying on top.”
I laughed. I neglected to mention that you don’t really sink into the mud. “You’ve got to wriggle your butt down into it. Really jam it in there.”
“This is ridiculous.” After an extended period of moaning and breathing heavily, she said, “This motherfuckin’ mud is hot as hell. Why didn’t you tell me it would be this hot?”
“Why don’t you just shut up and relax. You’re ruining my spa experience.”
“Oh, I will ruin your spa experience, all right. And when they do the autopsy on your body, they’re gonna find mud in places you never knew existed.”
Usually, I enjoy Lisa’s empty threats, but she was starting to get on my nerves. I wasn’t even close to becoming detoxified. “No, really. Are you ever going to stop talking? Or is that trap of yours set to run for the full forty-five minutes?”
“Oh, I still have more to say, dick whistle. This stuff reeks. You just spent three hundred bucks so we could steep ourselves in a giant pile of steaming horseshit.”
I let out a groan and stopped responding. Eventually Lisa went silent. She was either dead or exhausted, and I was grateful either way. We lay in our tub at a right angle, our toes pointed toward each other, for about twenty minutes. Once sufficiently overheated and pleasantly light-headed, I removed the washcloth and cucumbers from my eyes and checked to make sure Lisa’s were still covered. I stood up and with my hands and forearms wiped from my naked body the excess mud, which fell back into the tub in thick glops. I jauntily stepped over to the shower, my back to Lisa, and rinsed the remaining mud from my newly detoxed cracks and crevices.
“I’m getting into the Jacuzzi now,” I announced.
“Good for you, princess,” she said. “I’m getting out of here before a redwood takes root in my vagina.”
“OK, I’ll shut my eyes.”
The first sound I heard from Lisa’s direction was barely audible over the motor of the mineral bath. It was the kind of noise a middle-aged man might make getting out of bed after a solid sleep. Uuuunnnngh. The second sounded more like the first guttural emanations of a German charwoman suffering an appendicitis attack. Aaaaaoooo guhhhhpffft. And the third, the final audible cry of an elderly bison as it submits to a pack of hungry coyote. Mmmmbuh.
“Are you OK over there?” I asked.
“Pawk,” she said. “I’m stuck.”
* * *
Lisa and I have been calling each other Pawk for more than twenty years now. I am Pawk. She is Pawk. And together we are Pawk. It’s pronounced the way people with thick New York accents say pork.
The name stuck after a visit to our friend Sandra’s condo on Long Island. She had just given birth to her second son, Vincent, affectionately referred to as Baby Bincent by Isabel’s first son, Nicholas.
As soon as we sat down on the living room sofa, Nicholas, who was almost three and excited to receive company, brought Lisa and me one of his toys, a colorful limp-limbed clown.
“That’s one of his favorites,” Sandra said tepidly. She was nursing Vincent in a nearby chair. Her normally well-maintained hair was stringy and she looked like she was having trouble staying awake. “It speaks if you squeeze it.” Sandra, still in her early twenties, was the first of our high school cohort to have children, so her situation was foreign and awkward to us.
Evidently, the purpose of the doll was to teach some basic anatomy. When you squeezed its hand, you activated some microchip and the doll said, “Hand!” If you squeezed its leg, the doll said, “Leg!” Lisa and I must have been thinking the same thing, because she whispered in my ear: “Do you think this thing is anatomically correct?”
I replied, “Did you squeeze its . . . you know?”
“That’s the first place I squeezed. It’s dead down there.”
Playing with Nicholas, we could ignore the fact Sandra was married, with two small humans to keep alive. Responsibility frightened us. So, we kept squeezing.
“Head!” said the doll.
“Head!” yelled Nicholas.
“Head!” cheered Lisa and I.
“Hand!” said the doll.
“Hand!” yelled Nicholas.
“Hand!” cheered Lisa and I.
Squeeze.
“Tummy!” said the doll.
“Tummy!” yelled Nicholas.
“Tummy!” cheered Lisa and I.
Nicholas was getting all riled up, twirling around the living room with his hands in the air. His joy was contagious because we were all laughing like a bunch of kids on a playground. Then Lisa pressed the doll’s shoe.
“Foot! Foot!” said the doll. Apparently it had a glitch in that extremity because it said foot twice. Or maybe it was just ticklish.
Nicholas stopped in his tracks and stared at both of us.
“Pawk,” he announced, the way one might answer the question of what’s for dinner.
“What did he just say?” I asked Sandra. She shrugged.
“Pawk!” Nicholas yelled.
Lisa and I looked at each other. Then back at Nicholas. Then back at each other.
“Pawk!” we cried in unison.
We’ve been Pawk ever since.
* * *
“Pawk, I’m stuck.”
“You’re not stuck,” I assured her. “Just try harder.”
“I’m trying as hard as I can. I’m dying. In the mud.”
“Would you like me to call an ambulance?”
“Funny, douche canoe. But I’m not kidding. Help me out of here!”
“OK, OK,” I said, more than mildly annoyed. “Close your eyes!” I climbed out of the Jacuzzi and reached for my robe, which I had hung on a nearby hook. It looked so clean and white and soft. If I wore it to pull Pawk from the mud, it would get filthy. That’s not the way this should go, I thought. I want a pristine robe after my mineral bath. And so I decided to remain naked.
“Keep your eyes closed. I’m coming over,” I said.
“I honestly have no desire to see your dick. Just get me out of here before I fucking boil.”
During all of her grunting and groaning, Lisa had managed to swing her legs over the side of the tub. She must have inverted her center of gravity because her head was thrown back into the mud, her frizzy copper hair splayed around her like a slow-burning fire. As I gazed down upon her she struck me as a giant overturned turtle slowly sinking into a prehistoric tar pit.
“Oh, that’s not good,” I said. I couldn’t help but laugh. “Give me your hands and I’ll pull you up.” She raised her arms from her sides. I took hold of her wrists and she took mine. I steadied myself as best I could on the slick concrete floor and pulled. Her shoulders barely broke the surface. “You’re gonna have to help me out a bit here,” I told her.
“I’m trying,” she growled. And opened her eyes.
“You’re peeking!” I yelled.
“I can’t see anything except the ceiling!”
“Well, shut your eyes anyway.”
“Why do you get to have your eyes open?”
“How am I supposed to pull you out without looking?”
“Oh, I don’t even care at this point.”
“Believe me, it’s not like I want to see any of this.”
Now’s probably a good time for me to add that Lisa is not a small girl. And I’m not saying this with any judgment, because life happens and I adore her. But whenever I picture her in my head, I see her as she was when we were young, a little wisp of a thing, five feet tall and ninety pounds soaking wet. After thirty years, two kids, a bad marriage, and a decade of working overnights in a hospital, she’s put on some weight, much of it in the bust region. Lisa doesn’t say whether she minds it or not, though she will frequently note that many men are drawn to it. I, on the other hand, was doing everything in my power to avoid looking at it.
I propped my foot up on the tub, between where Lisa’s legs were dangling over the edge, and pulled as hard as I could.
“Puuuuuush!” I yelled.
“You’re hurting meeee!” she yelled.
I kept pulling and she kept falling back into the mud, again and again, until we were both laughing so hard we had to pause, twice, to catch our breath.
“I don’t know how much longer I can keep this up,” I said after ten minutes.
“Let’s give it one more try. Really put your back into it this time.”
“You need to squeeze your abs more.”
“Oh, shut up.”
Like one of those mothers who summons enough adrenaline to lift a Volkswagen off her kid’s leg, I found the strength to pull Pawk from her bog. One might think I deserved a heartfelt thank-you from my oldest friend in the world. Instead, Lisa—covered in so much mud that only the whites of her eyes resembled human tissue—asked: “Do your balls always hang that low?”
“It’s hot in here,” I said, covering my junk.
“Because, wow. That’s . . . really something.”
“It’s not too late for me to drown you,” I said.
Back in the reception area, Britaney told us we looked refreshed. We thanked her and said we enjoyed ourselves. I was halfway out the door, when I stuck my head back in. “Don’t forget to nominate your mother for the show,” I said.
“I won’t!” she answered.
Pawk went back to our hotel, where we split a bottle of wine and fell asleep before sunset, our salad days far behind us.