Just When You Think . . .

I am working on a proposal that opens as a woman packs for a funeral--but it's a funny scene. And from that point, her life gets worse until it's all she can do but throw up her hands and laugh.

That's I guess how I view life's calamities. True story . . . I was driving home from my job way back when I was an editor. It was pouring--I mean blinding sheets of rain. And I had my child in the car. She was 3. I pressed down on my brakes, and my foot went to the floor. Quick! I ran through my brain all those Shell programs on what you should do in a car emergency. Pump the brake. I did. Nothing. I was careening down the rain-slicked highway with NO brakes. None. Zip. Nothing. So I put on my hazards and stopped touching the gas pedal so I would slow down. I remembered something from that show about, if you have to, side-swipe something, rather than hit it head on. Up ahead, I saw a traffic light. It turned red, meaning I was about to go through it--and into four lanes of traffic. I looked to my left at the guardrail. Then I pulled my emergency brake. It slowed me down--some. Not to a standstill. I kept rolling. But eventually, impossibly, I rolled to a stop. I put the car in park and turned off the engine.

But because this occurred in the Land of Road Rage--South Florida--I was beeped at. It was about six at night, maybe 6:30, and it was dark--winter. People gave me the finger, with my car hazards on--like I had decided I would park there with my hazards on for the fun of it. I decided staying in the car was not wise. My daughter and I might get hit. So I waited until there was no traffic. I popped my hood so people would realize it was a disabled vehicle. I got out, and grabbed my daughter. I mentioned it was POURING. Hurricane-like pouring.

This was pre-cellphones. I mean, they existed, but they weren't common. So now I faced walking to a phone to call my dad to come get me. So I walked, in the pouring rain, holding my cold, shivering daughter, to a gas station. I asked the man to use their phone. I pointed to my car down the street. But just when I thought my night couldn't get worse . . .

He told me to f*ck off. No phone.

I begged him to use the phone. He told me no. He laughed at me. I held up my toddler to the window. "Give me a friggin' break, man. I have a baby in the rain." Nope.

So I found a payphone (brief aside, my father threatened the attendant's life when he came to get me, and I wrote to the owner of the station the next day and got the attendant fired) up the road. And I was rescued from the rain.

But in the story, there is a lesson. Just when I thought things couldn't get worse, they did. Until, in all seriousness, it became FUNNY. Of COURSE the attendant would be an a**hole. Of COURSE, I would have to go back out into a storm with my child to go to another payphone. Because that is sometimes the dark humor of the universe. When you think it can't get worse, it will. And then you will laugh, because it will reach this existential limit beyond which . . . you have to laugh.

Another true story. When I was first really sick with Crohn's disease, I kept getting sicker and sicker and sicker. My eyesight started failing from medications I was on. I ended up not able to walk because of medications I was on. And then they wanted me to go on chemotherapy. And in this whole mess, the idea that would now lose my hair was suddenly funny. And I decided I wouldn't wear a wig. I'd go for the scarf look. I decided the scarf would be my big middle finger to the gods. Like, you may THINK you got me down, but you didn't.

And I found it all funny, in a way.

So now, when I write humor . . . I "go there." You know how some people say, "Don't even go there"? No. GO THERE. That is the lesson I took from it. Life is absurd. It is never more absurd than in darkness and sadness, and in that absurdity, you can find humor. So that's how I write. I go there. And I laugh.

And you?