Jonathan Ames – on germs.

Brooklyn, New York
December 29, 2000

Dear Lauren,

Yesterday was a germ disaster. Truly incredible. Every time I left the house I was splattered with influenza microbes, as if my fellow humans were mist-machines and I was an orchid.

The day began happily enough. I slept quite late, moving in and out of dreams, until I finally got out of bed around noon. Then I ejected myself into the world, where I proceeded to have a lovely smoked-salmon sandwich at Cafe Melange on Atlantic Avenue. My phone-therapist had told me that a daily intake of salmon is good for depression. I found this to be excellent news. As you know, I have put up over the years a legendary resistance to his recommendations of anti-depressants, but I embraced this salmon-cure. “The perfect remedy for a Jew like myself,” I had said to him. “It makes me wonder whether pork is good for depressed Christians, and Muslims probably need lamb.” So of late I’ve been absorbing lox more than usual, since I’m having my annual winter suicidal-ideation fest, brought on by light deprivation and family gatherings.

I enjoyed the first half of my sandwich, lapping it up like some people gargle Paxil, but then I was full, and I asked the waiter to please wrap up the remaining half, thinking it would be wise to spread out my dosage across the day. So the waiter carried off my plate and I continued reading my newspaper and suddenly there was a volcanic sneeze. I feared for the worst, and it was indeed the worst that had occurred. I looked up to see my waiter in the after-throes of a nasal explosion, his head turned politely away from my plate – but had he turned in time? Most definitely not! I once saw a science show on PBS which captured, somehow, in slow-motion, the distance that the average sneeze travels. I clearly remember seeing on the television – a chilling image which has haunted me for years – thousands of particles flying out of a person’s nose and spreading a good fifteen feet in all directions. It turns out that the structure of the average human nostrils, while bearing a resemblance to a double-barreled shotgun or twin cannons, has the shooting ability of a gatling gun: its fire – microbes, not bullets – blankets and decimates everything within 180 degrees.

So it was clear that my salmon sandwich had been terrifically violated, and there was no way I could eat it now, and this was upsetting on a number of levels:

(1) I had wasted money – I should have cleared my plate. Also, I enjoy eating at Cafe Melange because the prices are reasonable. For $5.95 you get a smoked salmon sandwich, a nice heap of coleslaw, some mixed dark-green salad, and a pleasing complement of olives. But now my pleasure at a bargain was destroyed – for $5.95 I had only gotten to eat half a sandwich!

(2) The waiter would think I was nuts if I tried to confront him – very few people saw that PBS sneezing special – and so I felt a pathetic impotence when he brought me my half-sandwich neatly wrapped in a little bag. It’s like I’m a closet neurotic or something – I should have stood up for myself, for my sandwich. I even carried the thing all the way home and put it in my refrigerator, for some odd reason going through the motions as if I would eat the thing later in the day. Maybe I was trying to lessen the blow. “Act as if,” they call it, in New Age circles. But, still, it was very disturbing to think of that pretty sandwich – to all appearances a toothsome bit of nutrition – poisoned by the invisible seasoning of my waiter’s microbes.

(3) And, lastly, it was depressing to think that I had been deprived of a full dose of salmon; it’s not good to play around with one’s prescriptions.

After putting the sandwich in the fridge, I crawled into bed and took a nap, which, before I heard about salmon, was my old depression cure. In the late afternoon, I tried to rally and get some work done, but it was useless. The day was a complete waste, mostly because my sandwich had been killed. I then opted for socialization and distraction: in the early evening, I went to see “Cast Away” with a friend. It was playing at Union Square and the theater was very crowded and we sat in the balcony.

As soon as the movie started, the young waifish woman next to me, who was dressed like a college undergraduate – jeans, T-shirt, unwashed hair – convulsed three times in a row with sneezes. I scrunched myself into the far corner of my seat, hoping this was just a start-of-the-movie sneezing fit, and I felt slightly cursed, recalling of course the salmon incident just a few hours before. But I had no idea the extent of what I was about to go through. The young woman should have been on a croup ward in a hospital in a Dickens novel. Throughout the whole two-hour-and-twenty-minute movie, she coughed, sneezed, sniffled, choked, wheezed, and noisily re-inhaled whatever it was her nose was trying to expel. Like most people of her generation (and my generation, too) she had come unequipped with handkerchief or Kleenex. I kept trying to shame her into submission and good health by turning my neck violently at her, but she continued to infect me and everyone within miles, all the way down to the Angelika theater. It was maddening. She also had some kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder. She kept rearranging her hair nuttily and three times she took out a jar of moisturizer and rubbed down her face and hands. I looked around for two other seats, but there weren’t any, and again I was a bit of a closet neurotic – I didn’t want my friend to think I was insane.

I was outraged by this young co-ed, but I also felt somewhat guilty for all my neck-craning in her direction. Just a week ago, I went by myself to see “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” and I found the movie’s opening action scenes so stimulating that these high-pitched joyful squeals came out of me, which caused this fellow in front of me to whip his head around twice to show me that my reactions were immature and uncalled for. But I didn’t agree – the whole audience was moaning with pleasure. It’s just that I, being a little more susceptible to the effects of cinema, happened to be making extra-loud yelps of rapture. When he did it a third time, trying to wither me with his dead eyes, I let him have it. After he’d returned his gaze to the screen, I spoke hotly into the back of his head: “Listen,” I said, leaning forward with virile intent, “let me enjoy this film. What’s the big deal if I make a little noise? Just cool it!”

The action element of the movie had me feeling manly and aggressive, which accounts for my verbal assault, and he didn’t turn around for the rest of the film. I had put him in his place. But I also became self-conscious and didn’t squeal quite as much, though I did give myself credit for a moral victory and tried to fake a few loud squeals to show that I was undaunted. After the film, I stood up and stared at his back, ready to give him more verbal karate chops – I wanted to accuse him of being a pencil-necked bourgeois – but he pointedly didn’t turn to face me. The coward!

So my numerous attempts to shame the flu-ridden pestilence seated next to me at “Cast Away” did give me some pause as I thought of that snobby fool I had encountered and destroyed, but she really did deserve my craning neck. She should have stayed home and overdosed on some cold remedy. When the movie ended, I was sorely tempted to cut her in half with this line: “You really shouldn’t have come out tonight!” But I held my tongue and raced out of the theater and into the bathroom to wash my face and hands of her damn splattering. I was as riddled with microbes as Bonnie and Clyde with bullet holes.

So there you have it. My whole depressing report. Now I’m a bit hungry, having worked hard to type this to you, and it occurs to me that I still have that smoked-salmon sandwich. It almost feels – covered as it is with germs – like a living thing there in the fridge, like that tell-tale heart of Edgar Allen Poe, and I have this sort of mad compulsion to go eat it. But that must be the suicidal ideation and depression rearing its head again, which, if I look at it, is the start of all this anyway: the depression led me to salmon which led to the Cafe Melange episode which sort of led me to feeling the need to go to the movies.

But I still believe in salmon, so I’ll go out now, return to Cafe Melange, and get a fresh sandwich to go. Then I’ll come back here and eat it. Alone. In safety.

feeling a cough developing in the chest, oh, no…but sending my love, and not microbes, though perhaps you should handle this letter with rubber gloves…though mentioning this at the end is not fair warning, so I’ll jot a note on the envelope, well, big kiss and lots of love,

Jonathan